Legacy of historic land cover changes on sediment provenance tracked with isotopic tracers in a Mediterranean agroforestry catchment

Abstract

A Compound Specific Stable Isotope (CSSI) sediment tracing approach is applied for the first time in a Mediterranean mountain agroforestry catchment subjected to intense land use changes in the past decades. Many Mediterranean mountain environments underwent conversion of rangelands into croplands during the previous centuries to increase agricultural production. Converted land has increased the risk of erosion and in some cases has led to loss of the entire fertile topsoil. After land abandonment the process was gradually reversed during the middle of the 20th century, allowing the recovery of natural land cover and reduction of soil erosion rates.

The 13C abundance of long chain fatty acids was used as tracer to assess the contribution of soil under different vegetation covers in complex landscapes subjected to land use changes after land abandonment in a medium-sized Mediterranean catchment. A Bayesian mixing model (MixSIAR) was used for estimating the contribution of different land use types to suspended sediments. To this purpose, composite samples were collected over the four main land covers existing in the study area: cropland, Mediterranean forest, pine forest, scrubland, and two main geomorphic elements: highly disturbed areas such as exposed subsoil and channel banks. Suspended sediment traps were installed at three locations in the catchment to assess the variability of source contributions from the headwaters to the outlet of the catchment. At every sampling point three replicating traps integrated the suspended sediment per climatologic season during a one hydrological year. The fatty acids (FAs) content was significantly higher at the catchment outlet than at the headwaters. The δ13C signatures of the FAs were successful in discriminating between Mediterranean forest, scrubland, pine forest and both geomorphic elements. Overall, the model identified agricultural land as the largest contributing source for most of the sampled seasons. The inclusion of prior information with different informativeness produced variations in the model outputs and could represent an advantage as much as a disadvantage if priors are not used with caution and supported by robust evidence. The results of this study suggest that CSSI tracers are needed to correctly assess land use related sediment sources, while channel bank and subsoil contributions require geochemical tracers. The high agricultural apportionment despite its small coverage (16%) point out to the impact of human activities and the agriculture cycle on soil loss in these mountain agroforestry systems.