Grazing intensity affected spatial patterns of vegetation and soil fertility in a desert steppe
Resource information
Date of publication
декабря 2010
Resource Language
ISBN / Resource ID
AGRIS:US201301872366
Pages
282-292
Spatial heterogeneities of vegetation and soil can strongly affect ecological functions of ecosystems, particularly for arid and semi-arid ecosystems where vegetation has a patchy distribution and livestock grazing is one of the major land use types. However, little is known about the impact of grazing on spatial patterns of vegetation and soil, even though grazing has variously been shown to create, maintain or destroy those patterns. We studied how grazing intensity affected the spatial patterns of vegetation and soil fertility at scales ranging from 0.1 to 18.7m in a desert steppe in Inner Mongolia, China. Increasing grazing intensity decreased the range of spatial autocorrelation of plant aboveground biomass at the fine scale (