Izuki ENDO

Vegetation and subsequent ecosystem services can recover over time in forest headwaters devastated by massive disasters. However, in cold regions, their recovery rates are typically slow and often imperceptible, which makes it difficult to evaluate how much ecosystem services have recovered. This study targeted dissolved organic matter (DOM), which plays a central role in biogeochemical processes in forest ecosystems, and aimed to examine whether vegetation conditions affect the quality of stream DOM from cool-temperate forest headwaters in northern Japan. To achieve this, hydrological observations and stream water sampling were conducted monthly from May to December 2021 in three small forest catchments with different landslide coverage. Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) concentration in stream water was measured, and the molecular composition of DOM was analyzed using ultrahigh-resolution mass spectrometry and compared among the three catchments. The peak-intensity-weighted average aromaticity index (AIwa) increased with DOC concentration. We found that AIwa was the highest in the undisturbed catchment, followed by the catchments with landslide coverages of 16% and 52% at a given DOC level. These results indicate that the quality of DOM could dramatically change depending not only on DOC concentration but also on vegetation disturbance in cool-temperate forest headwaters.

Forest vegetation and soils in headwaters can control runoff and surface erosion. However, it remains unclear how vegetation affects nutrient exports from cool-temperate forest headwaters during intense rain events that transport sediment-associated nutrients, such as phosphorus (P). To clarify this, we targeted an upstream landslide area and analyzed P contents in surface soils and total P (TP) in stream water of the undisturbed (UF) and landslide-bearing forest (LB) catchments. The soil P content was higher in the UF catchment than in the LB catchment, but differences in the average TP concentration and load during low flows between these catchments were not significant. Conversely, the overall runoff and the TP load were three and ten times higher in the LB catchment than in the UF catchment, respectively, during a rain event with daily precipitation of 49 mm, despite the soil P content being much lower in the LB catchment. Particulate P (PP) accounted for more than 90% of the TP load during the rain event in the LB catchment, whereas dissolved P accounted for more than 80% of the TP load in the UF catchment. Therefore, soil surface mobility strongly affected P transport in the forest catchments. Our study suggests that vegetation not only reduces PP loads by controlling runoff, but also influences stream P forms in cool-temperate forests.