Quantifying Post-Fire Aeolian Sediment Transport Using Rare Earth Element Tracers

Abstract

Grasslands provide fundamental ecosystem services in many arid and semi-arid regions of the world, but are experiencing rapid increases in fire activity making them highly susceptible to post-fire accelerated soil erosion by wind. A quantitative assessment that integrates fire-wind erosion feedbacks is therefore needed to account for vegetation change, soil biogeochemical cycling, air quality, and landscape evolution. We investigated the applicability of a novel tracer technique – the use of multiple rare earth elements (REE) - to quantify aeolian soil erosion and to identify sources and sinks of wind-blown sediments in a burned and unburned shrub-grass transition zone in the Chihuahuan desert, NM, USA. Results indicate that the horizontal mass flux of wind-borne sediment increased approximately three times following the fire. The REE-tracer analysis of aeolian sediments shows that an average 88% of the horizontal mass flux in the control area was derived from bare microsites, whereas at the burned site it was derived from shrub and bare microsites, 42% and 39% respectively. The vegetated microsites, which were predominantly sinks of aeolian sediments in the unburned areas, became sediment sources following the fire. The burned areas exhibited a spatial homogenization of sediment tracers, highlighting a potential negative feedback on landscape heterogeneity induced by shrub encroachment into grasslands. Though fires are known to increase aeolian sediment transport, accompanying changes in the sources and sinks of wind-borne sediments likely influence biogeochemical cycling and land degradation dynamics. Our experiment demonstrated that REEs can be used as reliable tracers for field-scale aeolian studies.