Soil microbial activity is resistant to recreational camping disturbance in a Prosopis dominated semiarid savanna

Abstract Recreational camping has been shown to suppress plant cover and expand bare ground area. These shifts have important implications for soil health. We used campsites in a semiarid savanna at the Santa Rita Experimental Range (SRER) in Arizona to test the hypotheses that 1) recreational camping is a disturbance that limits plant cover and soil microbial activity, and 2) the presence of Prosopis, which is known to encourage a fertility island effect, increases soil microbial activity within campsites. Camping disturbance did not influence any sampled measures of edaphic properties, plant cover, or soil microbial biomass and exoenzyme activities. However, the presence of Prosopis resulted in elevated litter, total dissolved nitrogen (TDN), and dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Multiple linear regression models suggest that observed resistance of soil microbial activities to camping disturbance may be due to both increased availability of organic C and N substrates beneath Prosopis and heightened seasonal water availability.

• Publication year

  2020

• Venue

  Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment. Applied Soil Ecology

• Publication date

  2020-03-01

• Fields of study

  Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.apsoil.2019.103424
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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