The relationship between vegetation diversity and soil properties in earthquake slope

Abstract:

In this article, we carried out an investigation on the plant species and soil properties on eco-restored slope in Beichuan County of Sichuan Province, Southwest China, comparing with the natural slope which is not damaged by the earthquake. In our results, the plant species diversity and soil properties factors on different slope position were recorded, the principal component analysis and correlation analysis was adopted to study the connection of soil properties factors and the vegetation species diversity. We found that species diversity and soil properties earthquake slope were drastically reduced comparing to the non-damaged slope regardless of the slope positions. We also found that the variations of soil diversity and soil properties between different slope positions were much increased. In general, the difference of the bottom slope was larger than the middle slope, and the difference of the middle slope was larger than the top slope. Our data showed that the Margalef richness index had a close correlations with the local nitrogen, potassium and bacterial counts. Moreover, the Shannon-Wiener diversity index had much close relationships with the local nitrogen, catalase activity,bacteria and actinomycetes counts. Finally, ur principal component analysis showed that the total potassium contents, the total phosphorus contents, the urease activity, the sucrase activity and the fungi counts were the most important factors in the coaction of species diversity and soil properties.