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Control of climate and litter quality on leaf litter decomposition in different climatic zones

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Abstract

Climate and initial litter quality are the major factors influencing decomposition rates on large scales. We established a comprehensive database of terrestrial leaf litter decomposition, including 785 datasets, to examine the relationship between climate and litter quality and evaluate the factors controlling decomposition on a global scale, the arid and semi-arid (AS) zone, the humid middle and humid low (HL) latitude zones. Initial litter nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) concentration only increased with mean annual temperature (MAT) in the AS zone and decreased with mean annual precipitation (MAP) in the HL zone. Compared with nutrient content, MAT imposed less effect on initial litter lignin content than MAP. MAT were the most important decomposition driving factors on a global scale as well as in different climatic zones. MAP only significantly affected decomposition constants in AS zone. Although litter quality parameters also showed significant influence on decomposition, their importance was less than the climatic factors. Besides, different litter quality parameters exerted significant influence on decomposition in different climatic zones. Our results emphasized that climate consistently exerted important effects on decomposition constants across different climatic zones.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China (31222011, 31270363 and 31321061), National Basic Research Program of China (2013CB956303). University Construction Projects from Central Authorities in Beijing and Research Fund of State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Nanjing Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Science (Y412201439). We also want to thank Dr. Xin Jing, Dr. Yonghui Wang and the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

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  1. Department of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and the Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, Yifu Building No. 2, Haidian District, Beijing, 100871, China

    Xinyue Zhang & Wei Wang

  2. The Key Laboratory for Urban Habitat Environmental Science and Technology, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China

    Xinyue Zhang

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Zhang, X., Wang, W. Control of climate and litter quality on leaf litter decomposition in different climatic zones. J Plant Res 128, 791–802 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10265-015-0743-6

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