Abstract
Benefiting from southeast monsoon, the red soil hilly region in southeast China has excellent water and heat conditions, and land use here changed rapidly these years. Unreasonable land use, however, resulted in serious ecosystem degradation. Before 1980, most of the zonal vegetation in the study area, mainly consisting of evergreen broad-leaved forest, had been seriously destroyed, and degraded to grassland dominated by perennial grasses with scattered trees and shrubs. At the same time, severe soil degradation also occurred in some places of this region. The ecosystem degradation not only reduces the land productivity, but also has a deep impact on global change. So the restoration and reconstruction of the degraded ecosystems are not only important to the sustainable development of agriculture, but also helpful in understanding the role of this region playing in global change. In this paper, soil nutrient changes in surface horizon (0-20cm) of masson pine woods, wetland pine woods and Chinese fir woods planted in 1984, which are widely planted in the red soil hilly area, were studied. The results showed that Soil Organic Carbon decreased dramatically in the first 10 years, then increased gradually in the following 6 years, and reached to a relative steady status in the latest 5 years, while total nitrogen remained relatively steady, and soil acidification is visible.
