TY - JOUR
AU - Parton, W.
AB - In many of the world's drylands, human‐induced alteration of grazing and fire regimes over the past century has promoted the replacement of grasses by woody vegetation. Here, we evaluate the magnitude of changes in plant and soil carbon and nitrogen pools in a subtropical landscape undergoing succession from grassland to thorn woodland in southern Texas. Our approach involved linking a process‐based ecosystem model to a transition matrix model. Grass and forest production submodels of CENTURY were parameterized with field data collected from herbaceous and wooded landscape elements broadly representative of habitats in global savanna systems. The Markov (transition matrix) model simulated the displacement of grassland communities under land use practices typical of many modern grasslands and savannas (heavy livestock grazing; no fire) and climate events. The modeled landscape was initialized for pre‐Anglo‐European settlement grassland conditions and then subjected to heavy, continuous livestock grazing and elimination of fire beginning in the mid‐1800s. Rates of woody plant encroachment were directed by the Markov model, and the consequences for net primary production and plant and soil C and N pools were tracked by CENTURY.
TI - GRASSLAND TO WOODLAND TRANSITIONS: INTEGRATING CHANGES IN LANDSCAPE STRUCTURE AND BIOGEOCHEMISTRY
JF - Ecological Applications
DO - 10.1890/1051-0761(2003)13[911:GTWTIC]2.0.CO;2
DA - 2003-08-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/wiley/grassland-to-woodland-transitions-integrating-changes-in-landscape-OJ2yqNKUCv
SP - 911
EP - 926
VL - 13
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -