IMPACT OF MICROCLIMATE AND MINERAL STATUS ON NITROGEN FIXATION IN THE MOIST GULLY FORESTS OF BARBADOS, WEST INDIES
PDF

Keywords

plant community structure
intra-gully climate
soil
fine litter nitrogen fixation
nutrient dynamics

How to Cite

Sheridan, R. P., & Carrington, C. S. (1998). IMPACT OF MICROCLIMATE AND MINERAL STATUS ON NITROGEN FIXATION IN THE MOIST GULLY FORESTS OF BARBADOS, WEST INDIES. Selbyana, 19(2), 172–182. Retrieved from https://ojs.test.flvc.org/selbyana/article/view/120500

Abstract

Plant community structure, the related intra-gully climate, soil and fine litter nitrogen fixation, and nutrient dynamics were studied. Applewaite Gully, Barbados, supports a sunken forest with a temperature/precipitation ratio of 0.017 placing it on the moist end of the dry forest spectrum (25°C/1475 mm annual rainfall). The abrupt topographic change characteristic of the gullies results in a reduced vapor pressure deficit which maintains adequate litter and soil moisture to support nitrogen fixation. Mean acetylene reduction activity (ARA) value for fine litter was 25.1 mM C₂H₄m⁻² year⁻¹ at 191% moisture content and the mean soil ARA value was 14.3 mM C₂H₄m⁻²year⁻¹ at 59.5% moisture content. The potential nitrogen contribution by litter and surface soil nitrogen fixation ranged between 0.78 and 0.95 kgNha⁻¹ year⁻¹. Fine litter and soil nitrogen fixation potentially amends the low nitrogen content of infertile gully soils. The N values for fine litter and soil were low and characteristic of infertile soils, whereas P values were high. ARA exhibited a strong negative correlation with both soil and litter %N. Soil ARA may have been reduced due to high soil clay content limiting the availability of organic material.

PDF

Open Access and Copyright Notice

 

Selbyana is committed to real and immediate open access for academic work. All of Selbyana's articles and reviews are free to access immediately upon publication. There are no author charges (APCs) prior to publication, and no charges for readers to download articles and reviews for their own scholarly use.  To facilitate this, Selbyana depends on the financial backing of the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, the hard work and dedication of its editorial team and advisory board, and the continuing support of its network of peer reviewers and partner institutions.

Authors are free to choose which open license they would like to use for their work. Our default license is the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). While Selbyana’s articles can be copied by anyone for noncommercial purposes if proper credit is given, all materials are published under an open-access license with authors retaining full and permanent ownership of their work. The author grants Selbyana a perpetual, non-exclusive right to publish the work and to include it in other aggregations and indexes to achieve broader impact and visibility.

Authors are responsible for and required to ascertain that they are in possession of image rights for any and all photographs, illustrations, and figures included in their work or to obtain publication or reproduction rights from the rights holders. Contents of the journal will be registered with the Directory of Open Access Journals and similar repositories. Authors are encouraged to store their work elsewhere, for instance in institutional repositories or personal websites, including commercial sites such as academia.edu, to increase circulation (see The Effects of Open Access).