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- Title
Appraisal of arid land status: a holistic assessment pertains to bio-physical indicators and ecosystem values.
- Authors
Mathur, Manish; Sundaramoorthy, S.
- Abstract
Background: Appraisal of arid land status is very crucial one to know the extent and factors associated with their degradation. Previous studies from arid regions are mostly qualitative in nature (indicator assessment like good, moderate, severe, and very severe) and generally overlooked the significance of temporal fluctuation.Methods: In this study, the temporal status of 12 Indian arid lands was accessed by using a new integrated approach that includes attributes like relative converge score (RCS), herbaceous component score (HCS), soil quality indexModified (SQI), ecosystem monitoring value (EMV), and a modified bare patch index. From each land, data were collected during three seasonal events (pulse, inter-pulse, and non-pulse), and thus, status was evaluated with 36 observations. Data were analyzed by using frequency distribution, principal component analysis (PCA), student t test, and regression technique.Results: RCS and HCS were recorded minimum (0.005, 0.65) during non-pulse event and maximum (0.36, 1.79) during pulse event respectively. With this approach, multi-directional temporal status of lands identified that were grouped into lower (7), moderate (14), high (12), and very high (3) quality lands.Conclusion: This integrated study suggested that in arid regions, although rainfall triggers plant community composition, however, sole utilization of this parameter is unable to portray the true status of lands, and other physical (soil) and biotic (livestock and other anthropogenic) parameters are equally important and influential during other events.
- Subjects
LAND management; ECOSYSTEM management; SOIL quality; X-ray diffraction; MULTIPLE correspondence analysis (Statistics); DISTRIBUTION (Probability theory)
- Publication
Ecological Processes, 2018, Vol 7, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
2192-1709
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1186/s13717-018-0148-2