Impacts of long-term disturbance on soil health with relation to vegetation distribution in a tropical ecosystem

Abstract

Land-use and land-cover changes are the main cause of soil degradation and associated human and environmental problems. The study was conducted in Mai Mahiu ecosystem, Kenya whose aim was to assess long-term (1985 to 2015) impacts of land-use and land-cover changes on soil health with disturbance-induced vegetation distribution. Landsat archive was utilized to detect land-use change for 30 years at an interval of 15 years and analysed based on supervised image classification. Four land-use practices (undisturbed forest, disturbed forest, cropland and grassland) were selected and soil sampled to 15 cm depth for soil analyses. In this period, cropland increased by 135% at the expense of natural forest while built-up areas increased by three times. Soil bulk density increased significantly (p