Publication Date:
2022-05-25
Description:
Author's draft titled: Carbon sequestration in terrestrial ecosystems under elevated CO2 and temperature : role of dissolved organic versus inorganic nitrogen loss
Description:
Author Posting. © The Authors, 2004. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Ecological Society of America for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Ecological Applications 15 (2005): 71–86, doi:10.1890/03-5303
Description:
We used a simple model of carbon–nitrogen (C–N) interactions in terrestrial ecosystems to examine the responses to elevated CO2 and to elevated CO2 plus warming in ecosystems that had the same total nitrogen loss but that differed in the ratio of dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) to dissolved inorganic nitrogen (DIN) loss. We postulate that DIN losses can be curtailed by higher N demand in response to elevated CO2, but that DON losses cannot. We also examined simulations in which DON losses were held constant, were proportional to the amount of soil organic matter, were proportional to the soil C:N ratio, or were proportional to the rate of decomposition. We found that the mode of N loss made little difference to the short-term (〈60 years) rate of carbon sequestration by the ecosystem, but high DON losses resulted in much lower carbon sequestration in the long term than did low DON losses. In the short term, C sequestration was fueled by an internal redistribution of N from soils to vegetation and by increases in the C:N ratio of soils and vegetation. This sequestration was about three times larger with elevated CO2 and warming than with elevated CO2 alone. After year 60, C sequestration was fueled by a net accumulation of N in the ecosystem, and the rate of sequestration was about the same with elevated CO2 and warming as with elevated CO2 alone. With high DON losses, the ecosystem either sequestered C slowly after year 60 (when DON losses were constant or proportional to soil organic matter) or lost C (when DON losses were proportional to the soil C:N ratio or to decomposition). We conclude that changes in long-term C sequestration depend not only on the magnitude of N losses, but also on the form of those losses.
Description:
This work was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation (DEB 0108960 and DEB 0089585) and in part by the USGS Global Change Research Program.
Keywords:
Carbon–nitrogen interactions
;
Carbon sequestration
;
Dissolved inorganic nitrogen
;
Dissolved organic nitrogen
;
Ecosystem models
;
Global climate change
;
Carbon–nitrogen interactions
;
Terrestrial ecosystems
Repository Name:
Woods Hole Open Access Server
Type:
Preprint
Format:
330825 bytes
Format:
application/pdf
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