Environmental and anthropogenic drivers of soil methane fluxes in forests: Global patterns and among-biomes differences

Abstract

Forest soils are the most important terrestrial sink of atmospheric methane (CH₄ ). Climatic, soil and anthropogenic drivers affect CH₄ fluxes, but it is poorly known the relative weight of each driver and whether all drivers have similar effects across forest biomes. We compiled a database of 478 in situ estimations of CH₄ fluxes in forest soils from 191 peer-reviewed studies. All forest biomes (boreal, temperate, tropical and subtropical) but savannahs act on average as CH₄ sinks, which presented positive fluxes in 65% of the sites. Mixed effects models showed that combined climatic and edaphic variables had the best support, but anthropogenic factors did not have a significant effect on CH₄ fluxes at global scale. This model explained only 19% of the variance in soil CH₄ flux which decreased with declines in precipitation and increases in temperature, and with increases in soil organic carbon, bulk density and soil acidification. The effects of these drivers were inconsistent across biomes, increasing the model explanation of observed variance to 34% when the drivers have a different slope for each biome. Despite this limited explanatory value which could be related to the use of soil variables calculated at coarse scale (~1 km), our study shows that soil CH₄ fluxes in forests are determined by different environmental variables in different biomes. The most sensitive system to all studied drivers were the temperate forests, while boreal forests were insensitive to climatic variables, but highly sensitive to edaphic factors. Subtropical forests and savannahs responded similarly to climatic variables, but differed in their response to soil factors. Our results suggest that the increase in temperature predicted in the framework of climate change would promote CH₄ emission (or reduce CH₄ sink) in subtropical and savannah forests, have no influence in boreal and temperate forests and promote uptake in tropical forests.

Keywords: CH4 emission; CH4 uptake; global change; greenhouse gases (GHG); native forest; planted forest; static chamber.