Relationship between Forest Floor Cover Percentage and Soil Erosion Rate on the Forest Floor with an Impoverished Understory Grazed by Deer (Cervus Nippon) at Doudaira, Tanzawa Mountains.

Chu Lei, Ishikawa Yoshiharu, Shiraki Katsushige, Wakahara Taeko, Uchiyama Yoshimi

doi:10.4005/jjfs.92.261

Soil erosion has been progressing over a large area on the forest floor with an understory impoverished by the feeding of deer (Cervus Nippon) in Doudaira (East Tanzawa of Kanagawa prefecture). Soil erosion investigation plots 5 m long by 2 m wide were set up on the hillside slope in the beech (Fagus crenata) forest in 17 Doudaira to monitor the amount of soil erosion. We monitored the amount of the soil erosion from 2006 to 2008 once a month from April to November. At the same time we monitored the forest floor cover percentage (the total values of understory cover percentage and litter cover percentage) by using the photographs we had taken in the same period. As a result, we have discovered that there is a strong negative correlation expressed by an exponential function (E=65 exp (−0.0615×F) ) between the amount of the soil erosion per mm of the rainfall (E) and the forest floor cover percentage (F). From the equation, a little change in the forest floor cover percentage has a bigger influence on the amount of soil erosion where the forest floor cover percentage is in the small range than when it is in the large range. This result is very different from previous studies which have shown a negative linear relationship between the amount of soil erosion and the litter cover percentage in a rainfall simulator experiment.

Relationship between Forest Floor Cover Percentage and Soil Erosion Rate on the Forest Floor with an Impoverished Understory Grazed by Deer (Cervus Nippon) at Doudaira, Tanzawa Mountains.

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