Feedbacks between vegetation and soil moisture in mountain grasslands

Abstract:

Soil moisture content (SMC) is a key variable for water budget and controls both physical processes, as runoff generation, and biological processes, as vegetation development. On the other hand, vegetation and land management influence soil evolution and therefore SMC dynamic. Moreover, in mountain areas complex topography adds an additional control on water fluxes and climate. For those reasons, understanding the controls on the spatio-temporal variability of SMC is essential to predict how perturbations in vegetation and climate affects mountain hydrology.

In this contribution we want to analyze the impact of different land management (meadows versus pastures) on the spatial and temporal dynamic of surface and root-zone SMC, and its relationships with climate and topography. We focus on water-limited alpine grasslands in the LTER area Mazia Valley in the European Alps. The infrastructure includes a dense network of more than 20 stations measuring soil moisture, biomass production observations and two eddy-covariance stations over meadow and pasture. Moreover, more than ten high-resolution SAR (Sentinel1 and RADARSAT2) images were acquired, in combination with ground surveys to monitor SMC spatial distribution. In order to understand the different physical controls, SMC has been also modelled using the GEOtop hydrological model, coupled with a dynamic vegetation model.

Results show that meadows and pastures have different behaviors. Meadows are in general wetter and in flatter locations. This leads to higher vegetation productivity, development of soils with higher water holding capacity and to a positive feedback on SMC. In contrast, pastures are drier, in steeper locations with lower vegetation density and more compact soils due animal trampling, with a negative feedback on SMC. This co-evolution of land cover and SMC leads to persistent spatial patterns controlled by both topography and management.