Retention of Nitrogen Following Wildfire in a Chaparral Ecosystem

摘要: Wildfires alter nitrogen (N) cycling in Mediterranean-type ecosystems, resetting plant and soil microbial growth, combusting biomass to ash, enhancing N availability the upper layer. This ash pool (that is, wildfire N) is susceptible loss from watersheds via runoff leaching during post-fire rains. Plant recovery may mitigate these losses by sequestering compounds new biomass, thereby promoting landscape retention N-limited chaparral ecosystems. We investigated relative balance between loss, uptake stream export for an upland watershed southern California that burned (61%) a high-intensity 2009 using combination of stream, vegetation, microbial, remote sensing analyses. Soil burn scar was 440% higher than unburned beginning first wet season returned within 66 days pre-fire levels. Stream 1480% rain 106 days over course following three rainstorms A watershed-scale mass revealed 52% could be accounted whereas 1% dissolved nitrogen.