Spatial variability of forest floor and topsoil thicknesses and their relation to topography and forest stand characteri
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Spatial variability of forest floor and topsoil thicknesses and their relation to topography and forest stand characteristics in managed forests of Norway spruce and European beech Kateřina Zajícová1,2 · Tomáš Chuman1,3 Received: 2 March 2020 / Revised: 14 August 2020 / Accepted: 5 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Soils play a significant role in climate regulation, especially due to soil organic carbon (SOC). The SOC pool is therefore modeled for various environments, and forest floor and topsoil thicknesses are important parameters for most of these models as they store most of the SOC. However, the forest floor and topsoil thicknesses show high spatial variability which is a result of multiple factors which are not agreed upon among scientists. Out of these factors, we choose topography parameters (elevation, slope, and topography wetness index) and forest stand characteristics (stand age, dominant tree species, and forest floor cover), and soil moisture, and we analyzed their relationship to the forest floor and topsoil thicknesses. The study was performed in a managed submontaneous forest in Central Europe dominated by Picea abies (L.) Karsten with small patches of Fagus sylvatica L. or other species. The thicknesses of the O horizons (Oi, Oe, Oa) and topsoil were measured at 221 sampling pits. Geographically weighted regression showed that the spatial variability of the overall forest floor plus topsoil thickness (OA) is responsible for 8% of its variability. The thickness of the OA is the most strongly controlled by forest floor cover explaining approximately 6% of its variability and soil moisture explaining 2–6% of the variability. The Oi + Oe horizon thickness is controlled only by forest floor cover explaining 10.7% of its variability, and the thickness of Oa + A horizon can be explained mainly by soil moisture in mineral horizon explaining 9% of the variability. Keywords Soil organic carbon · Temperate climate · Geographically weighted regression · Cambisols · Podzols
Introduction Soils provide important ecosystem services (Adhikari and Hartemink 2016) owing to their key functions, i.e., carbon storage, biomass production, water filtration and water storage, nutrients’ supply, or provide habitat for numerous species and their activity (Adhikari and Hartemink 2016; Wiesmeier et al. 2019). The principal soil component Communicated by Agustín Merino. * Kateřina Zajícová [email protected] 1
Department of Physical Geography and Geoecology, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Albertov 6, 128 43 Prague 2, Czech Republic
2
Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Bělidla 986/4a, 603 00 Brno, Czech Republic
3
Czech Geological Survey, Klárov 3, 118 21 Prague 1, Czech Republic
controlling most of these soil functions is soil organic matter. It increases water retention capacity and hydraulic conductivity (Bens et al. 2007), it is a source of nutrients (Hansson et al. 2013), and thic
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