Impacts of land use changes on soil properties

5 Pags.- 2 Figs. ©Los autores. Under Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).After land abandonment, the soil physico-chemical properties vary significantly among different land uses in this mountain agroecosystem. The soil properties values indicate that agricultural land has less fertile soils. Due to afforestation and natural revegetation, soil organic carbon and total nitrogen have significantly increased, supporting the key role of management of agricultural lands in soil organic carbon and nitrogen dynamics. The results extracted from remote sensing analysis and soil nutrient quantification suggest that in the short term, afforestation produces a faster increase in soil organic carbon than natural cover, although an increase is not observed in nitrogen. The results of this research could help policymakers to develop plans to reduce the loss of nutrients and to make decisions about best practices after land abandonment and future afforestation programmes.Peer reviewe