Overview of studies on stemflow chemistry effect on soil: systematic review of the literature

Abstract

The study systematically analyzes the literature in order to identify the main contributions of the trunk runoff study on the soil nutrient flux in recent years. The review included 47 articles published from 2015 to 2019. The aim of the present study is to correlate the main stemflow research subtopics that have contributed to chemical soil enrichment. Correlation analysis was performed in Iramuteq software with the aid of R software, based on keywords in the selected articles. There has been an overall upward trend in research related to stemflow impact on soil nutrient flux, mainly in Asia, whose publications have significantly increased over the latest years. Based on the keyword co-occurrence map, “stemflow” and “throughfall” were the main used terms because they established strong correlation to other keywords, mainly to “concentration”, “composition”, “biogeochemical cycle”, “nutrient cycling” and “dissolved organic matter”. These terms, in their turn, were correlated to and co-occurred with several other keywords, such as “soil”, “nitrogen”, “water chemistry”, “nutrient dynamics” and “cations”.