Tuesday, 8 November 2005
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Spatial Distribution of Soil Properties and Soil Physical-Chemical Diversity in the Greater Everglades Ecosystem.

Gregory L. Bruland1, Sabine Grunwald1, Todd Z. Osborne1, K. R. Reddy1, and Susan Newman2. (1) University of Florida, IFAS, Soil and Water Science Department, 2169 McCarty Hall / PO Box 110290, Gainesville, FL 32611-0290, (2) South Florida Water Management District, Everglades Division, P.O. Box 24680, West Palm Beach, FL 33416-4680

The spatial distributions of soil properties across wetland landscapes represent the combined effects of various biotic and abiotic factors. Consequently, existing landscape patterns contain information about the processes that generated these patterns. The use of geographic information systems and geostatistics have improved scientists' ability to describe patterns in soils over larger spatial scales and at increasingly finer resolution. In the Florida Everglades, the spatial distribution of soil nutrients can be used to assess long-term impacts to this system. To this end, over 1,300 soil samples were collected from the Greater Everglades Ecosystem (GEE) in 2003-2004. Samples were collected by helicopter from the upper 0-10 cm using a stratified random sampling design. The objectives of this study were to: (i) characterize the spatial distributions of soil properties such as bulk density (BD), soil organic matter (by loss on ignition), and total nitrogen (TN) across the GEE, and (ii) evaluate multivariate metrics of soil physical-chemical diversity (i.e. Shannon's index) and to map the distribution of these diversity metrics across the GEE. Interpolated maps of the individual soil properties produced by kriging and splining revealed that BD was highest in the Big Cypress National Preserve and in northwestern Water Conservation Area (WCA) 3A. Distributions of LOI were highest in WCA-1 and in southern WCA-3. Distributions of TN, on the other hand, showed much less variability. Soil physical-chemical diversity displayed an integrative spatial pattern that was a composite of the distributions of the individual soil properties. In some impacted areas, soil diversity appeared to be a function of the distance from water control structures, while in the pristine interior areas of the GEE, soils generally exhibited lower diversity. Lessons learned from this project may be applicable to other landscapes that exhibit multi-scale spatial variability and that are subject to anthropogenic impacts.

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