Impacts of Tracked Vehicles on Sediment from a Desert Soil

Seed banks in a degraded desert shrubland: Influence of soil surface condition and harvester ant activity on seed abundance

“…Even though disturbance changed surface conditions -such as the shift toward coarse textured soils on compacted sites and the increase in surface topography on trench sites -litter had a dominant influence on viable seed densities. Litter is also known to promote nutrient cycling (Hooker and Stark, 2008), lower sediment yield and run-off (Fuchs et al, 2003;Neave and Rayburg, 2007), and reduce wind erosion (Li et al, 2005). Litter can be rapidly and easily estimated, which makes it a prospective indicator of site condition in degraded arid lands (de Soyza et al, 1998).…”

Assessing the impacts of military vehicle traffic on natural areas. Introduction to the special issue and review of the relevant military vehicle impact literature

“…Controlled replicated studies and related studies that produce equivalent types of information have been successfully used to: (1) quantify relationships between level of use and amount of impact [17,[31][32][33][34][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59]61,64,65,69,70,[72][73][74][75][76]79,102,116], (2) provide vehicle impact estimates for carrying capacity models [78,81,82,117,118], (3) assess the relative durability of study sites [70,71,80], and (4) quantify site recovery rates ...…”

“…These studies typically assess the impact of a specific vehicle and impact regime under controlled conditions on soil and vegetation resources and evaluate the ability of the site to sustain and recover from the impact [21,[31][32][33][34]36,38,39,41,42,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55][56][57][58][59][69][70][71]. The vehicle studied is typically either the most damaging vehicle used during training, most common vehicle used in off-road training activities, or a new weapon system being fielded at an installation.…”