Pasture enclosures increase soil carbon dioxide flux rate in Semiarid Rangeland, Kenya
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pasture enclosures play an important role in rehabilitating the degraded soils and vegetation, and may also influence the emission of key greenhouse gasses (GHGs) from the soil. However, no study in East Africa and in Kenya has conducted direct measurements of GHG fluxes following the restoration of degraded communal grazing lands through the establishment of pasture enclosures. A field experiment was conducted in northwestern Kenya to measure the emission of CO 2 , CH 4 and N 2 O from soil under two pasture restoration systems; grazing dominated enclosure (GDE) and contractual grazing enclosure (CGE), and in the adjacent open grazing rangeland (OGR) as control. Herbaceous vegetation cover, biomass production, and surface (0–10 cm) soil organic carbon (SOC) were also assessed to determine their relationship with the GHG flux rate. Vegetation cover was higher enclosure systems and ranged from 20.7% in OGR to 40.2% in GDE while aboveground biomass increased from 72.0 kg DM ha −1 in OGR to 483.1 and 560.4 kg DM ha −1 in CGE and GDE respectively. The SOC concentration in GDE and CGE increased by an average of 27% relative to OGR and ranged between 4.4 g kg −1 and 6.6 g kg −1 . The mean emission rates across the grazing systems were 18.6 μg N m −2 h −1 , 50.1 μg C m −2 h −1 and 199.7 mg C m −2 h −1 for N 2 O, CH 4 , and CO 2 , respectively. Soil CO 2 emission was considerably higher in GDE and CGE systems than in OGR ( P < 0.001). However, non-significantly higher CH 4 and N 2 O emissions were observed in GDE and CGE compared to OGR ( P = 0.33 and 0.53 for CH 4 and N 2 O, respectively). Soil moisture exhibited a significant positive relationship with CO 2 , CH 4 , and N 2 O, implying that it is the key factor influencing the flux rate of GHGs in the area. The results demonstrated that the establishment of enclosures in tropical rangelands is a valuable intervention for improving pasture production and restoration of surface soil properties. However, a long-term study is required to evaluate the patterns in annual CO 2 , N 2 O, CH 4 fluxes from soils and determine the ecosystem carbon balance across the pastoral landscape.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".