**Abstract**

Forest degradation impairs ability of the whole landscape adaptation to environmental change. The impacts of forest degradation on landscape are caused by a self-organization decline. At the present time, the self-organization decline was largely due to nitrogen deposition and deforestation which exacerbated impacts of climate change. Nevertheless, forest degradation processes are either reversible or irreversible. Irreversible forest degradation begins with soil damage. In this paper, we present processes of forest soil degradation in relation to vulnerability of regulation adaptability on global environmental change. The regulatory forest capabilities were indicated through soil organic matter sequestration dynamics. We devided the degradation processes into quantitative and qualitative damages of physical or chemical soil properties. Quantitative soil degradation includes irreversible loss of an earth's body after claim, erosion or desertification, while qualitative degradation consists of predominantly reversible consequences after soil disintegration, leaching, acidification, salinization and intoxication. As a result of deforestation, the forest soil vulnerability is spreading through quantitative degradation replacing hitherto predominantly qualitative changes under continuous vegetation cover. Increasing needs to natural resources using and accompanying waste pollution destroy soil self-organization through biodiversity loss, simplification in functional links among living forms and substance losses from ecosystem. We concluded that subsequent irreversible changes in ecosystem self-organization cause a change of biome potential natural vegetation and the land usability decrease.

**Keywords:** global environmental change, pollution, nitrogen deposition, deforestation, soil self-organization

## **1. Introduction**

Human activity induces degradation of many ecosystems, of which the forest degradation results in far-reaching alterations in nutrient cycles in other related types of the environment. The forest degradation, including impacts on ecosystem functions, is intensified by terrestrial environmental change. Forests are most affected by felling and critical loads of pollution. Both processes may be characterized by negative impacts on soil which subsequently causes a decline in the forest natural ability to regenerate [1]. The damage of forest soils signifies that the development of potential natural vegetation is endangered. Damaged forest soils do not allow restoration of

original plant community due to disturbed mitigation of environmental fluctuations. Soil capability to mitigate environmental fluctuations resides in uninterrupted cycles of organic matter and continuous fertility. The disruption of forest soil nutrient cycles disadvantages management utilization including sustainable landscape management [2].

Global environmental change involves a related sequence of biophysical, ecosystem and socio-economic alterations that damage life-sustaining abilities of the planet [3]. The current global change is caused by human transformation of the natural environment, but also by the reaction of human communities to the induced modifications. Human transformations of natural environment are concentrated in a critical zone. The critical zone is range among sphere interfaces on the Earth's surface, where human changes in structure, chemical composition, radiation balance and biodiversity extend [4]. The most vulnerable part of the terrestrial critical zone is composed of soil (pedosphere), which includes interfaces among atmosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere and biosphere. For these reasons, the soil damage has been altering character of the entire ecosystem over a long period [5].

The most serious soil damage is due to land use modifications after deforestation. While mere forest felling only gives rise to reversible changes in ecosystem functions, the combination of forest felling with soil erosion or conversion for the need of subsequent management utilization generates irreversible ecosystem degradation. Deforestation is instantly followed by declining evaporation and soil loss. The imminent consequences of deforestation are gradually leading to the regional climate change, the loss of ecosystem recoverability and uninhabitable landscape [6]. Regional climate change is mainly caused by reduction of water cycle between the lower-lying areas with higher evaporation and the higher-lying areas with higher atmospheric precipitation in the catchment. The evaporation reduction after deforestation is not sufficient to create cloudiness to make surfaces cooler. Subsequent decrease in precipitation over the higher-lying parts of the river basin deepens water shortage as well as further evaporation decrease in the lower-lying parts [7]. The forest ecosystem recoverability loss is caused mainly due to depletion of the organic matter from the exposed soils, which stimulates germination of tree seeds by means of hormonal effects and moisture retention [8]. Ultimate landscape uninhabitability is caused by uncontrollable soil erosion as a result of surface exposure to wind and landslides of weathered rocks impoverished of organic binders [9].

Forest ecosystem restoration is made impossible within the recent global change, except for soil erosion by pollution. Nitrogen pollution from industry and agriculture has become a major environmental driver of the forest growth [10]. However, atmospheric pollution with the available nitrogen forms is manifested contradictorily within different soil types in forests. The forests situated on optimally fertile soils were generally favorably affected by nitrogen pollution while the predominant forests located on poor soils were damaged. On the one hand, adequate nitrogen intake supports plant growth and, on the other hand, it increases demands on other mineral resources which are declining as a result of human changes in the environment [11]. The unnaturally increasing disparity between plant demands and dwindling nutrient resources causes growth decrease and gradual ecosystem degradation even in hitherto unspoilt areas [12]. Even though the largest nitrogen deposition occurs in the vicinity of pollution sources with lower precipitation, higher concentrations of available nitrogen in wet deposition acidify ecosystems significantly. Approximately 70–80% of nitrogen released from industrial products falls back to the Earth's surface [13]. Of the nitrogen inputs, 5% penetrates the groundwater, 12%

### *Soil Degradation Processes Linked to Long-Term Forest-Type Damage DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106390*

is released into the atmosphere, 30% is immobilized in soil organic matter and 53% is removed with the crop. The utilization of nitrogen by the plant production is still declining, whereas the rate of nitrogen losses by leaching and gasification as well as immobilization in the soil increases in proportion to the amount of fertilizers [14]. Nitrogen supplied to the soil by means of fertilizers results in faster depletion of available bases, making the soil more susceptible to acidification [15].

The environmental nitrogen load is becoming an increasingly important driver of the global ecosystem change as it has exceeded the critical level in large areas of most continents [16]. Exceeding critical nitrogen loads extended plant susceptibility to drought [2, 17, 18]. The widespread plant susceptibility is compound of growing sensitivity of terrestrial ecosystems to climate change. Subsequently, the processes of the climate change and alterations in complex growth conditions for plant communities lead to a deviation in development of prospective natural vegetation or to biome alteration [19]. Therefore, the soil protection is becoming a tool to mitigate the effects of the global terrestrial change maintaining ecosystem link among forests, water cycle and human civilization [5].
