Effects of land use change on soil moisture content at different soil depths

초록

Land use is a paramount human-induced change that has redesigned the world's surface since the beginning of civilization. With the worldwide population increment in the last decade, a lot of natural forests have been converted into croplands, which damage soil properties. Over time, some of these established croplands have been transformed into forest plantations to reduce damages to soil properties. Nowadays, scientists are interested on how these land use changes affect soil moisture. Although many studies have been documented in this area, they have not critically studied how soil moisture varies with soil depth between different land use types. In this review, we discuss soil moisture variability with depth in a natural forest, mono-and mixed-croplands, orchard, and mono-and mixed-forest plantations. We observed that the shift in land use from a natural forest into either a mono cropland resulted in the reduction of soil moisture at the topsoil layers, or the establishment of a mixed cropland resulted in high soil moisture at the topsoil layers and the increment and decrease of soil moisture with depth. However, the conversion of cropland to a mono forest or orchard caused soil moisture to decrease with the depth from the top soil layer (0-20 cm) to the inner soil layer (0-40 cm). After the conversion of cropland into a mixed forest, the soil moisture decline was severe in the deeper soil layer of 30-90 cm. This information will be useful in understanding soil moisture, which is essential for the management of environmental soil water.

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