Restoring overgrazed Chaco forest: do soil chemical properties change after different years of domestic livestock exclusion?

ELIANA AREVALO; ANDRÉS TÁLAMO; FERNANDA MARTÍNEZ-GÁLVEZ; ANA CHÁVEZ; JOHANNA CROCE; CAROLINA TRIGO

Foz do Iguassu

Conferencia; VII World Conference on Ecological Restoration - V Congreso Iberoamericano y del Caribe de Restauración Ecológica - I Conferência Brasileira de Restauração Ecológica; 2017

Society for Ecological Restoration

Extensive livestock grazing is a major conservation-management concern in many forests around the world One way to restoreovergrazed forests is with livestock exclusion Nevertheless, we do not know experiments that evaluate the effectiveness ofexclusions in the restoration of dry-forest of South America Thus, we studied how soil chemical properties change with differentyears of livestock exclusion in a dry Chaco forest (NW-Argentina) We installed livestock exclusion in 2007 and 2012 following arandomized block design Three treatments were compared: continuous year-long livestock grazing (CG), grazing excluded for2 years (2Y), and grazing excluded for 9 years (9Y) We assessed the exclusion effects on a variety of soil chemical parametersResults of the two-way ANOVA showed that there was no signifcant difference between treatments respect to pH, extractable-P,exchangeable-Na and C/N ratio (p>0 05) Surprisingly, in 9Y exclusion the organic matter, organic-C, total-N and exchangeable-Kvalues were lower than those of the other treatments (p