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. 2019 Apr 18:2:132.
doi: 10.1038/s42003-019-0370-1. eCollection 2019.

Soil nitrogen determines greenhouse gas emissions from northern peatlands under concurrent warming and vegetation shifting

Junwei Luan #  1   2 , Jianghua Wu #  2 , Shirong Liu  3 , Nigel Roulet  4 , Mei Wang  2   5
Affiliations

Soil nitrogen determines greenhouse gas emissions from northern peatlands under concurrent warming and vegetation shifting

Junwei Luan et al. Commun Biol. .

Abstract

Boreal peatlands store an enormous pool of soil carbon that is dependent upon - and vulnerable to changes in - climate, as well as plant community composition. However, how nutrient availability affects the effects of climate and vegetation change on ecosystem processes in these nutrient-poor ecosystems remains unclear. Here we show that although warming promoted higher CH4 emissions, the concurrent addition of N counteracted most (79%) of this effect. The regulation effects of the vegetation functional group, associated with the substrate quality, suggest that CH4 emissions from peatlands under future warming will be less than expected with predicted shrub expansion. In contrast, N2O flux will be enhanced under future warming with predicted shrub expansion. Our study suggests that changes in greenhouse gas emissions in response to future warming and shifts in plant community composition depend on N availability, which reveals the complex interactions that occur when N is not a limiting nutrient.

Keywords: Biogeochemistry; Climate-change ecology; Ecosystem ecology; Wetlands ecology.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Ecosystem respiration (a), methane (b), and nitrous oxide (c) fluxes observed during the manipulation experiment year of 2015. Solid circles mean the ninety-fifth and fifth percentiles, the range of each column is from twenty-fifth to seventy-fifth percentile, the short dash in each column indicates the mean, the dash in each column is the median. G + S graminoids and shrubs both present, G graminoids only present, S shrubs only present, None no vascular vegetation present. Note: for all plots, the substrate layer of Sphagnum mosses remained intact
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) (a), total nitrogen (TN) (b), and C/N ratio (c), for soil pore water under different treatments. Solid circles mean the ninety-fifth and fifthpercentiles, the range of each column is from twenty-fifth to seventy-fifth percentile, the short dash in each column indicates the mean, the dash in each column is the median. G + S graminoids and shrubs both present, G graminoids only present, S shrubs only present, None no vascular vegetation present
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Dissolved organic carbon (DOC) composition indices SUVA254 (a) and a250/a365 (b) for soil pore water under different treatments. Solid circles mean the ninety-fifth and fifth percentiles, the range of each column is from twenty-fifth to seventy-fifth percentile, the short dash in each column indicates the mean, the dash in each column is the median. G + S graminoids and shrubs both present, G graminoids only present, S shrubs only present, None no vascular vegetation present
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
Schematic showing CO2, CH4, and N2O fluxes in northern peatlands and the potential independent and interactive impacts of warming, N deposition and plant community composition. The letter G or S on a line indicates the effect of the presence or absence of graminoids (G) or shrubs (S), respectively. The circles in red color indicate that the interactive effects revealed by this study but were unknown before
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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