AN INITIAL STUDY OF SOIL ORGANIC CARBON AND POST-AGRICULTURE FOREST SUCCESSION AGE ON THE ITHACA COLLEGE NATURAL LANDS

Soils, particularly those in forests, represent one of the important global reservoirs for carbon. However, there are many variables that affect the amount of organic carbon in forest soils such as climate and human disturbances. Of particular interest is the effect of agriculture on soil organic carbon. A good place to study this is on South Hill in Ithaca, New York. This area was clear-cut in the 17^th century for farming purposes but today it is considered a post-agriculture forest. Farming was progressively abandoned at different times leading to the creation of distinct forest communities at different stages of succession. In this study, we present an initial study of total organic carbon (TOC) analyses from different forest communities on South Hill. Soil samples were collected from five plots with varying ages (seedling-sapling, poletimber, and sawtimber) and each plot comes from a portion of the forest with similar soil characteristics in an attempt to control for soil type. TOC was determined using the loss-on-ignition (LOI) method. The TOC for seedling-sapling was 6.3±1.6%, poletimber was 6.0±1.8%, and sawtimber was 6.3±1.2% demonstrating that there is no statistical difference between plots. It is possible the soil on the plots with older trees has not had enough time to accumulate an adequate amount of organic matter to display a difference in TOC based on forest age.