Estimating contributions of sources of soil CO2 at the shallower layer in a Japanese larch forest area

Soils contain about twice the amount of carbon presented in the atmosphere, so a small change in the soil carbon will influence atmospheric chemistry and heat balance. The soil carbon ultimately exchanged with the atmospheric CO2 as soil CO2, which mainly exists at the depth of 0-20 cm. The transport of soil CO2 is affected by the sources of soil CO2. Thus, separation of the contributions of sources of soil CO2 is a fundamental need to understand and predict implications of environmental change on soil carbon cycling and sequestration. It is a complicated task, so that a number of different methodological approaches such as component integration, root removal, and gap analyses have been developed. However, these methods could not avoid changing soil characteristics such as air-filled porosity, soil temperature and soil water contents. Consequently, fractional contributions of respiration of living root and decomposition of soil organic matter to the total soil CO2 cannot be estimated correctly. In this study, based on mass balance theory of both concentrations and δ^13C of soil CO2, a trenching method with a stable-isotope technique was used to determine both soil CO2 sources at the depth of 3-13 cm in a Japanese larch forest area during 30 May to 7 October 2005 and fractional contributions of these sources. Experimental results showed that the amount of atmospheric CO2 invaded the soil air was not significantly variable while its percent rate in the total soil CO2 had significantly temporal variations with the lower values between 5 August and 1 September. The litter-layer decomposition was very small. The soil CO2 derived from the respiration of living root and the decomposition of soil organic matter showed significantly temporal variations with increase from 30 May to 5 Aug. and decrease from 1 September to 7 October, 2005; and it accounted for 82%-98% of the total soil CO2 in which the respiration of living root was in the range from 32% to 62%.

Estimating contributions of sources of soil CO2 at the shallower layer in a Japanese larch forest area