抄録
Arid land afforestation can be considered as one of the countermeasures for global warming. A series of experiments has been carried out in Sturt Meadows near Leonora, Australia for developing the techniques for effective plantation in arid land. In that study, we found that unlike other ecosystems, amount of carbon in the litter and soil was much less than carbon in above ground plant bodies in natural forests in Sturt Meadows. In order to analyze the fate of carbon in those experimental sites and investigate what causes this less than usual amount of carbon, we constructed a litter and soil carbon dynamics model. Effect of the number of compartments for litter carbon was investigated and we concluded that the model having only one compartment for litter carbon would suffer from significant error comparing to the models having 2 compartments for litter carbon. For explaining the less than usual amount of soil and litter carbon in Sturt Meadows forests, we have to incorporate the physical loss of the litter in the model. It was estimated a significant amount of litter, ranging 50 to 70% of input litter, was removed from the sites physically, that is, by flooding of water, winds, and other mechanism.
