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Biodiversity, Nitrogen Deposition, and CO2 Affect Grassland Soil Carbon Cycling but not Storage

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Abstract

Grasslands are globally widespread and capable of storing large amounts of carbon (C) in soils, and are generally experiencing increasing atmospheric CO2, nitrogen (N) deposition, and biodiversity losses. To better understand whether grasslands will act as C sources or sinks in the future we measured microbial respiration in long-term laboratory incubations of soils collected from a grassland field experiment after 9 years of factorial treatment of atmospheric CO2, N deposition, and plant species richness on a deep and uniformly sandy soil. We fit microbial soil respiration rates to three-pool models of soil C cycling to separate treatment effects on decomposition and pool sizes of fast, slow, and resistant C pools. Elevated CO2 decreased the mean residence time (MRT) of slow C pools without affecting their pool size. Decreasing diversity reduced the size and MRT of fast C pools (comparing monocultures to plots planted with 16 species), but increased the slow pool MRT. N additions increased the size of the resistant pool. These effects of CO2, N, and species-richness treatments were largely due to plant biomass differences between the treatments. We found no significant interactions among treatments. These results suggest that C sequestration in sandy grassland soils may not be strongly influenced by elevated CO2 or species losses. However, high N deposition may increase the amount of resistant C in these grasslands, which could contribute to increased C sequestration.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the undergraduate BioCON interns for field work, Jared Trost and Kally Worm for experimental maintenance and management, and Chris Clark for assistance in the lab. We thank the US National Science Foundation through the Cedar Creek Long Term Ecological Research program (DEB-0080382), LTER (9411972, 0620652), Biocomplexity (0322057), and LTREB (0716587) programs; the US Department of Energy (DE-FG02-96ER62291 and DE-FC02-06ER64158); and the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund for support of this project. Joseph Reid was supported by NSF IGERT 0504195.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 55108, USA

    Joseph P. Reid & Sarah E. Hobbie

  2. National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, Santa Barbara, California, 93101, USA

    E. Carol Adair

  3. Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, Minnesota, 55108, USA

    Peter B. Reich

  4. Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW, 2751, Australia

    Peter B. Reich

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  1. Joseph P. Reid
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Correspondence to Joseph P. Reid.

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JPR and ECA performed the soil incubations and analyses, and analyzed data. JPR wrote the manuscript with contributions from all co-authors.

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Reid, J.P., Adair, E.C., Hobbie, S.E. et al. Biodiversity, Nitrogen Deposition, and CO2 Affect Grassland Soil Carbon Cycling but not Storage. Ecosystems 15, 580–590 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-012-9532-4

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