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

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

Conferencia; VII World Conference on Ecological Restoration. V Congreso Iberoamericano y del Caribe de Restauración Ecológica; 2017

Extensive livestock grazing is a major conservation-management concern in many forests around the world One way to restore overgrazed forests is with livestock exclusion Nevertheless, we do not know experiments that evaluate the e ectiveness of exclusions in the restoration of dry-forest of South America Thus, we studied how soil chemical properties change with di erent years of livestock exclusion in a dry Chaco forest (NW-Argentina) We installed livestock exclusion in 2007 and 2012 following a randomized block design Three treatments were compared: continuous year-long livestock grazing (CG), grazing excluded for 2 years (2Y), and grazing excluded for 9 years (9Y) We assessed the exclusion e ects on a variety of soil chemical parameters Results of the two-way ANOVA showed that there was no signi cant di erence 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-K values were lower than those of the other treatments (p