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Title Observation of abiotic site properties: Results for biodiversity and implications for monitoring

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Short title Abiotic diversity

Author(s) Petersen, A.(1); Gröngröft, A.(1); Schmiedel, U.(2); Jürgens, N.(2)

Presenting author Petersen, A.

Institution(s) (1) Institute of Soil Science, University of Hamburg; (2) Biocentre Klein Flottbek, University of Hamburg

Keywords pedodiversity, biodiversity, soil, transect analysis, monitoring

Abstract The analysis and monitoring of biodiversity requires a profound knowledge about the abiotic ecosystem compounds. Soils as integrative elements reflect various environmental influences and are therefore a valuable indicator of abiotic diversity. Pedodiversity is a recent concept for the creation of a quantitative measure of soil diversity and was tested by different approaches on a dataset of the BIOTA Southern Africa transect. The results show that pedodiversity indices provide an integrative measure for soil variation of defined areas.
The presentation will give examples of the correlation of pedo- and biodiversity and show the requirements for soil monitoring aspects in the drylands of Southern Africa with respect to landuse and climate change. Whereas highly dynamic site properties like soil water content and temperature are necessary parameters to explain ecosystem functioning, meta-stable properties like pH-.value and soil carbon content have to be included in long-term monitoring programs. It will be shown, how the high spatial heterogeneity of site properties has to be considered within the monitoring programs of the studied drylands.

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Topic No. 1.8
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Ref. No. 575