SOIL CONDITION AND MORPHOLOGY ON TRAILS IN THE WHITE MOUNTAINS REGION

Over 1200 miles of hiking trails, plus many additional user-created foot trails in campgrounds, climbing, and hiking areas create public access to scenic or otherwise interesting features in the White Mountain National Forest. Each trail varies in morphological, design, and usage characteristics yet all need to be maintained with a common core of best practices for long-term sustainable use. The processes of weathering and trail user traffic combine to shape a trail and its surrounding terrain, compacting the trail tread, eroding and depositing soil, and altering the natural flow of water over the landscape. In order to build and maintain sustainability in recreational trails, it is critical to understand the physical processes affecting them, including the rates of landform change on trail surfaces, and factors that cause these changes. This information assists land managers in determining the limits of acceptable change in conditions on a trail. This project begins that work, surveying 152 points within 13 segments of four hiking trails in the Pemigewasset Region of the White Mountains, New Hampshire, collected in the summer and fall of 2014. These trail surveys assess erosion and changes to soil properties, using LiDAR, analyses of soil organic matter content, bulk density, and particle size distribution to estimate soil loss as a function of time and to determine which factors have the greatest effects on soil compaction and erosion. I test various hypotheses about which variables are most responsible for erosion on trails using data from each sample point in multivariate regressions.