Pedosphere 23(1): 48--58, 2013
ISSN 1002-0160/CN 32-1315/P
©2013 Soil Science Society of China
Published by Elsevier B.V. and Science Press
| Vegetation and topographic control on spatial variability of soil organic carbon |
I. OUESLATI1, P. ALLAMANO1 , E. BONIFACIO2 and P. CLAPS1 |
1 DITIC, Politecnico di Torino, 10129 Torino (Italy)
2 DIVAPRA, Università di Torino, 10095 Grugliasco (Italy) |
| ABSTRACT |
| Soil organic carbon (SOC) is one of the most important parameters affecting the hydraulic characteristics of natural soils. Despite being rather easy to measure, SOC is known to be highly variable in space. In this study, vegetation, climate, and morphology factors were used to reproduce the spatial distribution of SOC in the mineral horizons of forest and grassland areas in northwestern Italy and the feasibility of the approach was evaluated. When the overall sample (114 samples) was analyzed, average annual rainfall and elevation were significant descriptors of the SOC variability. However, a large part of the variability remains unexplained. Two stratification criteria were then adopted, based on vegetation and topographic properties. We obtained an improvement of the quality of the estimates, particularly for grasslands and forests in the absence of local curvatures. These results indicate that the spatial variability of soil organic matter is scarcely reproducible at the regional scale, unless an a-priori reduction of the heterogeneity is applied. A discussion on the feasibility of applying stratification criteria to deal with heterogeneous samples closes the paper. |
| Key Words: natural soils, regression analysis, soil organic carbon, spatial variability |
| Citation: Oueslati, I., Allamano, P., Bonifacio, E. and Claps, P. 2013. Vegetation and topographic control on spatial variability of soil organic carbon. Pedosphere. 23(1): 48-58. |
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