IANIGLA   20881
INSTITUTO ARGENTINO DE NIVOLOGIA, GLACIOLOGIA Y CIENCIAS AMBIENTALES
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
Assessing the sensitivity of riparian algarrobo dulce (Prosopis flexuosa DC) radial growth to hydrological changes
Autor/es:
ROIG-JUÑENT, FIDEL ALEJANDRO; PIRAINO, SERGIO
Revista:
GEOCHRONOMETRIA
Editorial:
WIND-J WOJEWODA PUBL CO
Referencias:
Lugar: Gliwice; Año: 2016 vol. 43 p. 1 - 8
ISSN:
1733-8387
Resumen:
Ecotones, as for example riparian zones, have long interested ecologists, due to their potential role in generating species biodiversity and evolutionary novelty, as well as their sensitivity to  environmental changes. Along riparian areas, vegetation is recognized for its ecological importance in several ecosystemic processes. In the Central Monte Desert (central-west Argentina), Prosopis flexuosa grows in territories characterized by a permanent access to water reservoirs, e.g. along riverbanks, where the species forms the classic gallery forests. Despite the ecosystemic role of thedifferent Prosopis species distributed in arid lands, thus far no analysis has been conducted regarding the relation between their radial growth and hydrological changes, namely streamflow variability, in riparian settings. To fill this gap of knowledge, we performed a dendrochronological analysis considering several riparian P. flexuosa trees differing in their spatial position in relation to the riverbank. Pointer years, correlation function, and regression analyses show differences in thedendrohydrological signal of the studied species, probably function of tree distance from the river. In this sense, radial growth of trees distributed near the riverbank is tightly coupled to spring-summer (September to March) streamflow variability, whereas for farthest trees the ring  development is driven by a combination of winter and spring river discharge and late-summer precipitation amount. The presented results demonstrate the potentiality of P. flexuosa, and in a broader sense of the Prosopis genus, in dendrohydrological studies.