Document Type

Thesis

Date of Award

Spring 2025

Department

ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

First Advisor

Amber Churchill

Second Advisor

Yuxin Wang

Abstract

Biodiversity has consistently been found to have positive ecosystem effects, including erosion mitigation and stability of nutrient cycling. For lawns, this can translate to reducing the need for fertilizer application, and reducing soil loss and leaching that can impact water quality. This paper investigates the effects of biodiversity and plant community establishment in a lawn ecosystem on soil erosion, nitrate leaching via porewater sampling, and plant available nitrogen.

In the first growing season of PLEDGE (the Pastures and Lawns Enhanced Drought and Global-Change Experiment), we hypothesized that three-species lawns (tall fescue, dwarf white clover, and creeping thyme) would experience higher nitrogen availability and less erosion.

Our general findings were that plant establishment had significant effects on nitrate leaching, and that diversity treatment had the strongest impact on leaching during early community establishment. For the plant available nitrogen, we found that ammonium was significantly lower in fescue-only (referred to as Fes) plots, but there were no significant differences in nitrate associated with diversity. These findings show that adding additional plant species to lawns can reduce the need for fertilizer without increasing the risk of nitrogen leaching.

Comments

This work is part of a larger lawn biodiversity study at Professor Amber Churchill's Pasture and Lawn Enhanced Diversity Global-change Experiment.

Recommended Citation

Kanyuk, Masami S., "Lawn nutrient availability and run-off during establishment under enhanced biodiversity" (2025). Environmental Studies Honors Theses. 1.
https://orb.binghamton.edu/environmental_theses/1