Disturbance and recovery of biological soil crusts
Document Type
Article
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Biological Soil Crusts: Structure, Function, and Management
First Page
363
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Last Page
383
Publication Date
2003
Abstract
Disturbance can profoundly affect the cover, species composition, and the physiological functioning of biological soil crusts. The disturbances we discuss include air pollution; exposure to oil, herbicides, and pesticides; invasion by annual exotic weeds; mechanical disturbances such as human and livestock trampling (see Chap. 29), off-road driving, mining, and hiking; and, briefly, wildfire (for extensive discussion, see Chap. 28). Studies on disturbance have generally been limited to the western US and Australia, with limited work done in China, Israel, South Africa, and Zimbabwe.
Methods of assessing impacts of, and recovery from, disturbance have been highly variable in the past. Generally, measurements have been limited to visual estimates of crust cover. However, Belnap (1993) showed that visual assessment can accurately assess only moss and lichen cover, and cannot be used to measure recovery of cyanobacterial biomass, soil stability, and/or physiological functioning of crustal organisms. In addition, some studies have only considered total crust cover but have not delimited the relative cover of cyanobacteria, mosses, and lichens. The relationships between total crust cover and impacts of disturbance can be weak, as cyanobacterial cover generally increases, while moss and lichen cover decreases, after disturbance. This often makes total crust cover a poor measure of the dynamics of soilcrust recovery. Differentiating between crustal components is also important because alteration of species composition can heavily influence ecological functioning of the crusts (Eldridge 1998).
Comparing recovery rates from different studies can be problematic, as factors known to control recovery rates (such as site stability and precipitation following disturbance) are often not reported. More importantly, severity of disturbance is seldom quantified. Studies generally report disturbance levels as "light", "moderate", or "heavy" without any definition of these categories; thus, what is "moderate" in one study may be considered "heavy" in another. As studies cover a large range of climatic zones, soil types, levels of disturbance, and ways to calculate recovery, and because there has been no standard for measuring crust recovery, it is not surprising that recovery rates in the literature have ranged widely (2 years in cool deserts to over 3000 years in very dry deserts), and either show no pattern or often appear contradictory (Anderson et al. 1982; Callison et al. 1985; Jeffries and Klopatek 1987; Cole 1990; Belnap 1995,1996; Belnap and Warren 1998).
Recommended Citation
Belnap, J., and Eldridge, D., 2003, Disturbance and recovery of biological soil crusts, in Belnap, J., and Lange, O. L., eds., Biological Soil Crusts: Structure, Function, and Management: Berlin, Springer-Verlag, p. 363-383.
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