(Excerpted with permission from Jornada Trails Volume 2, Issue 1, March 1996)
Working together for many years at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Walnut Gulch research station in southeastern Arizona, the research team of Athol D. Abrahams (SUNY-Buffalo), Tony Parsons (University of Leicester, U.K.) and John Wainwright (King's College, London) have joined the Jornada LTER project. They hope to extend their studies of runoff and sediment transport to a broad area of the desert Southwest.
In recent work published in Geomorphology, the team showed that the invasion of desert grasslands by shrubs causes increased erosion from the "interrill" areas, by decreasing resistance to overland flow. This erosion increases the spatial heterogeneity of nutrients in desert soils. Last summer, Athol and his coworkers performed a number of rainfall simulation experiments at the Jornada, in which the runoff waters were collected for measurements of the loss of nitrogen, phosphorus and other soil nutrients from soils in grassland and shrubland habitats.