Fire alters the availability of soil nutrients and accelerates growth of Eucalyptus grandis in Zambia
- PDF / 454,869 Bytes
- 9 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 6 Downloads / 204 Views
ORIGINAL PAPER
Fire alters the availability of soil nutrients and accelerates growth of Eucalyptus grandis in Zambia Donald Chungu1,2 • Phillimon Ng’andwe1 • Henry Mubanga1 • Felix Chileshe1
Received: 3 December 2018 / Accepted: 5 January 2019 Ó The Author(s) 2019
Abstract Fire has been used to prepare land during tree plantation establishment for many years but uncertainty about how ecosystems respond to prescribed burning makes it difficult to predict the effects of fire on soil nutrients. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of burning accumulated forest residues (slash) on soil chemical properties and how trees respond. We analyzed 40 burned and unburned sites and compared growth of Eucalyptus grandis W. Hill ex Maiden between sites. Soil pH increased by 39% after fire, suggesting reduced soil acidity and increased liming. Total nitrogen increased by 100%; other nutrients (Ca2?, Mg2? and K?) also increased. Increase in nutrients had a significant effect on the growth of E. grandis; larger and taller trees were associated more with burned than unburned sites. This study provides evidence that burning accumulated slash during land preparation prior to plantation establishment alters soil nutrient status and enhances the growth of E. grandis. Keywords Nitrogen mineralization Forest residue burning Soil nutrients Zambia exotic plantations Plantation establishment Eucalyptus grandis
Project funding: This project was funded by Copperbelt University. The online version is available at http://www.springerlink.com. Corresponding editor: Zhu Hong. & Donald Chungu [email protected]; [email protected] 1
School of Natural Resources, Copperbelt University, P.O. Box 21692, Kitwe, Zambia
2
Directorate of Distance Education and Open Learning, Copperbelt University, P.O. Box 21692, Kitwe, Zambia
Introduction Fire has been used to prepare land for the establishment of tree plantations for many decades. However, fire can alter soil properties and influence tree growth (Tng et al. 2014). It sometimes has a fertilizing effect on both physical and chemical properties (Pyne 2001; Heydari et al. 2015; Nabatte and Nyombi 2013; Thomaz et al. 2014). This fertilizing effect led Knapp and Seastedt (1986) and Ojima et al. (1994) to propose the nitrogen mineralization hypothesis, that nitrogen (N) availability is elevated following fire. Since plant growth increases with available N (Yafei et al. 2015), in this study we expect increased growth of Eucalyptus grandis on burned sites compared to unburned sites. Several studies have shown that during the first few years following burning, labile nitrogen in soil was higher on burned than on unburned sections of the forest (Certini 2005; James et al. 2018). Ammonium and nitrates, the main sources of nitrogen for plants, often increase after fire because ammonium is released from organic matter due to heating, and the nitrification process is often stimulated (Wan et al. 2001). Biological processes are responsible for the release of nitrogen confined in un
Data Loading...
