Short-term grazing exclusion has no impact on soil properties and nutrients of degraded alpine grassland in Tibet, China

Lu, X.; Yan, Y.; Sun, J.; Zhang, X.; Chen, Y.; Wang, X.; Cheng, G.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/se-6-1195-2015

Articles | Volume 6, issue 4

Solid Earth, 6, 1195–1205, 2015

https://doi.org/10.5194/se-6-1195-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Solid Earth, 6, 1195–1205, 2015

https://doi.org/10.5194/se-6-1195-2015

© Author(s) 2015. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 6, issue 4

Research article 05 Nov 2015

Research article | 05 Nov 2015

Short-term grazing exclusion has no impact on soil properties and nutrients of degraded alpine grassland in Tibet, China

X. Lu et al.

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Final revised paper (published on 05 Nov 2015)
Preprint (discussion started on 26 Aug 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC C1026: 'Referee comments', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Aug 2015
RC C1099: 'se-2015-82', Anonymous Referee #2, 22 Sep 2015
AC C1240: 'Author responses to reviewers', Xuyang Lu, 26 Oct 2015

Short summary

Grazing exclusion has been widely adopted to restore degraded grasslands in Tibet. We investigated soil properties and nutrients by comparing free-grazing and grazing exclusion grasslands. The results showed that grazing exclusion had no impact on most soil properties and nutrients, and even caused a considerable decrease in soil TN and TP in the soil surface layer. Nevertheless, climate conditions during the growing season played an important role in controlling the soil quality status.