Soil Discussions

Journal: Soil Discussions

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Copernicus

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Publications 1 - 9 of 9

Soil properties and not inputs control carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus ratios in cropped soils in the long-term
Frossard, Emmanuel; Buchmann, Nina; Bünemann, Else K.; et al. (2015)
Soil Discussions
Eddy covariance for quantifying trace gas fluxes from soils
Eugster, Werner; Merbold, Lutz (2014)
Soil Discussions
Soils are highly complex physical and biological systems, and hence measuring soil gas exchange fluxes with high accuracy and adequate spatial representativity remains a challenge. A technique which has become increasingly popular is the eddy covariance (EC) method. This method takes advantage of the fact that surface fluxes are5 mixed into the near-surface atmosphere via turbulence. As a consequence, measurement with an EC system can be done at some distance above the surface, providing accurate and spatially integrated flux density estimates. In this paper we provide a basic overview targeting at scientists who are not familiar with the EC method. This reviews gives examples of successful deployments from a wide variety of ecosystems. The pri-10 mary focus is on the three major greenhouse gases carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane (CH₄), and nitrous oxide (N₂O). Several limitations to the application of EC systems exist, requiring a careful experimental design, which we discuss in detail. Thereby we group these experiments into two main classes: (1) manipulative experiments, and (2) survey-type experiments. Recommendations and examples of successful studies15 using various approaches, including the combination of EC flux measurements with online measurements of stable isotopes are given. We conclude that EC should not be considered a substitution of traditional flux measurements, but an addition to the latter. The greatest strength of EC measurements in soil science are (1) their uninterrupted continuous measurement of gas concentrations and fluxes that also can capture short-20 term bursts of fluxes that easily could be missed by other methods; and (2) the spatial integration covering the ecosystem scale (several m² to ha), thereby integrating over small-scale heterogeneity in the soil.
Assessing soil erosion of forest and cropland sites in wet tropical Africa using 239+240 Pu fallout radionuclides
Wilken, Florian; Fiener, Peter; Ketterer, Michael; et al. (2020)
Soil Discussions
Due to the rapidly growing population in tropical Africa, a substantial rise in food demand is predicted in upcoming decades, which will result in higher pressure on soil resources. However, there is limited knowledge on soil redistribution dynamics following land conversion to arable land in tropical Africa that is partly caused by challenging local conditions for long-term landscape scale monitoring. In this study, fallout radionuclides 239+240Pu are used to assess soil redistribution along topographic gradients at two cropland sites and at three nearby pristine forest sites located in the DR Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. In the study area, a relatively high 239+240Pu baseline inventory is found (mean forest inventory 41 Bq m−2). Pristine forests show no indication for soil redistribution based on 239+240Pu along topographical gradients. In contrast, soil erosion and sedimentation on cropland reached up to 37 and 40 cm within the last 55 years, respectively. Cropland sites show high intra-slope variability with locations showing severe soil erosion located in direct proximity to sedimentation sites. This study shows the applicability of a valuable method to assess tropical soil redistribution and provides insight on soil degradation rates and patterns in one of the most vulnerable regions of the World.
Continental-scale controls on soil organic carbon across sub-Saharan Africa
von Fromm, Sophie Franziska; Hoyt, Alison M.; Acquah, Gifty E.; et al. (2020)
Soil Discussions
Earlier studies have demonstrated that soil texture and geochemistry strongly affect soil organic carbon (SOC) content. However, those findings primarily rely on data from temperate regions with soil mineralogy, weathering status and climatic conditions that generally differ from tropical and sub-tropical regions. We investigated soil properties and climate variables influencing SOC concentrations across sub-Saharan Africa. A total of 1,601 samples were analyzed, collected from two depths (0–20 cm and 20–50 cm) at 45 sentinel sites from 17 countries as part of the Africa Soil Information Service (AfSIS) project. The dataset spans climatic conditions from arid to humid and includes soils with a wide range of pHH20 values, weathering status, soil texture, exchangeable cations, extractable metals and a variety of important land cover types. The most important SOC predictors were identified by linear mixed effects models, regression trees and random forest models. Our results indicate that SOC is primarily controlled by aridity index (PET/MAP), exchangeable calcium (Caex) and oxalate-extractable aluminum (Alox); this was found across both depth intervals. Oxalate-extractable iron (Feox) emerged as the most important predictor for both depth intervals in the regression tree and random forest analyses. However, its influence on SOC concentrations was strong only below Feox concentrations of 0.25 wt %. This suggests that Feox can act as a pedogenic threshold – even on a continental scale. Across model-ling approaches, clay and fine silt content (< 8 µm) and land cover were not significant SOC pre-dictors, in contrast to common assumptions. Our findings indicate that the key controlling factors of SOC across sub-Saharan Africa are similar to what has been reported for temperate regions – except for soil texture and vegetation cover. However, the strength and importance of the controlling factors vary across the environmental gradient we studied.
Controls on heterotrophic soil respiration and carbon cycling in geochemically distinct African tropical forest soils
Bukombe, Benjamin; Fiener, Peter; Hoyt, Alison M.; et al. (2021)
Soil Discussions
Heterotrophic soil respiration is an important component of the global terrestrial carbon (C) cycle, driven by environmental factors acting from local to continental scales. For tropical Africa, these factors and their interactions remain largely unknown. Here, using samples collected along strong topographic and geochemical gradients in the East African Rift Valley, we study how soil chemistry and soil fertility, derived from the geochemical composition of soil parent material, can drive soil respiration even after many millennia of weathering and soil development. To address the drivers of soil respiration, we incubated soils from three regions with contrasting geochemistry (mafic, felsic, and mixed sedimentary) sampled along slope gradients. For three soil depths, we measured the potential maximum heterotrophic respiration under stable environmental conditions as well as the radiocarbon content (Δ14C) of the bulk soil and respired CO2. We found that soil microbial communities were able to mineralize C from fossil as well as other poor quality C sources under laboratory conditions representative of tropical topsoils. Furthermore, despite similarities in terms of climate, vegetation, and the size of soil C stocks, soil respiration showed distinct patterns with soil depth and parent material geochemistry. The topographic origin of our samples was not a main determinant of the observed respiration rates and Δ14C. In situ, however, soil hydrological conditions likely influence soil C stability by inhibiting decomposition in valley subsoils. Our study shows that soil fertility conditions are the main determinant of C stability in tropical forest soils. Further, in the presence of organic carbon sources of poor quality or the presence of strong mineral related C stabilization, microorganisms tend to discriminate against these sources in favor of more accessible forms of soil organic matter as energy sources, resulting in a slower rate of C cycling. Our results demonstrate that even in deeply weathered tropical soils, parent material has a long-lasting effect on soil chemistry that can influence and control microbial activity, the size of subsoil C stocks, and the turnover of C in soil. Soil parent material and its lasting control on soil chemistry need to be taken into account to understand and predict C stabilization and rates of C cycling in tropical forest soils.
Nutrient limitations regulate soil greenhouse gas fluxes from tropical forests: evidence from an ecosystem-scale nutrient manipulation experiment in Uganda
Tamale, Joseph; Hüppi, Roman; Griepentrog, Marco; et al. (2021)
Soil Discussions
Tropical forests contribute significantly to the emission and uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O). However, studies on the soil environmental controls of greenhouse gases (GHGs) from African tropical forest ecosystems are still rare. The aim of this study was to disentangle the regulation effect of soil nutrients on soil GHG fluxes in a tropical forest in northwestern Uganda. Therefore, a large-scale nutrient manipulation experiment (NME) based on 40 m × 40 m plots with different nutrient addition treatments (nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), N + P, and control) was established. Soil CO2, CH4, and N2O fluxes were measured monthly using permanently installed static chambers for 14 months. Total soil CO2 fluxes were partitioned into autotrophic and heterotrophic components through a root trenching treatment. In addition, soil temperature, soil water content, and mineral N were measured in parallel to GHG fluxes. N addition (N, N + P) resulted in significantly higher N2O fluxes in the transitory phase (0–28 days after fertilization, p < 0.01), because N fertilization likely increased soil N beyond the microbial immobilization and plant nutritional demands leaving the excess to be nitrified or denitrified. Prolonged N fertilization however, did not elicit a significant response in background (measured more than 28 days after fertilization) N2O fluxes. P fertilization marginally and significantly increased transitory (p = 0.052) and background (p = 0.010) CH4 consumption, probably because it enhanced methanotrophic activity. Addition of N and P together (N + P) resulted in larger CO2 fluxes in the transitory phase (p = 0.010), suggesting a possible co-limitation of N and P on soil respiration. Heterotrophic (microbial) CO2 effluxes were significantly higher than the autotrophic (root) CO2 effluxes (p < 0.001) across all treatment plots with microbes contributing about three times more to the total soil CO2 effluxes compared to roots (p < 0.001). However, neither heterotrophic nor autotrophic respiration significantly differed between treatments. The results from this study suggest that the feedback of tropical forests to the global soil GHG budget could be disproportionately altered by changes in N and P availability in these biomes.
Filling a key gap: a soil infrared library for central Africa
Summerauer, Laura; Baumann, Philipp; Ramirez-Lopez, Leonardo; et al. (2021)
Soil Discussions
Information on soil properties is crucial for soil preservation, improving food security, and the provision of ecosystem services. Especially, for the African continent, spatially explicit information on soils and their ability to sustain these services is still scarce. To address data gaps, infrared spectroscopy has gained great success as a cost-effective solution to quantify soil properties in recent decades. Here, we present a mid-infrared soil spectral library (SSL) for central Africa (CSSL) that can predict key soil properties allowing for future soil estimates with a minimal need for expensive and time-consuming wet chemistry. Currently, our CSSL contains over 1,800 soils from ten distinct geo-climatic regions throughout the Congo Basin and wider African Great Lakes region. We selected six hold-out core regions from our SSL, augmented them with the continental AfSIS SSL, which does not cover central African soils. We present three levels of geographical extrapolation, deploying Memory-based learning (MBL) to accurately predict carbon (TC) and nitrogen (TN) contents in the selected regions. The Root Mean Square Error of the predictions (RMSEpred) values were between 0.38–0.86 % and 0.04–0.17 % for TC and TN, respectively, when using the AfSIS SSL only to predict the six regions. Prediction accuracy could be improved for four out of six regions when adding central African soils to the AfSIS SSL. This reduction of extrapolation resulted in RMSEpred ranges of 0.41–0.89 % for TC and 0.03–0.12 % for TN. In general, MBL leveraged spectral similarity and thereby predicted the soils in each of the six regions accurately; the effect of avoiding geographical extrapolation and forcing regional samples in the local neighborhood (MBL-spiking) was small. We conclude that our CSSL adds valuable soil diversity that can improve predictions for the regions compared to using the continental scale AfSIS SSL alone; thus, analyses of other soils in central Africa will be able to profit from a more diverse spectral feature space. Given these promising results, the library comprises an important tool to facilitate economical soil analyses and predict soil properties in an understudied yet critical region of Africa. Our SSL is openly available for application and for enlargement with more spectral and reference data to further improve soil diagnostic accuracy and cost-effectiveness.
The role of geochemistry in organic carbon stabilization in tropical rainforest soils
Reichenbach, Mario; Fiener, Peter; Garland, Gina; et al. (2021)
Soil Discussions
Stabilization of organic carbon in soils (SOC) depends on several soil properties, including the soil weathering stage and the mineralogy of parent material. As such, tropical SOC stabilization mechanisms likely differ from those in temperate soils due to contrasting soil development. To better understand these mechanisms, we investigated SOC dynamics at three soil depths under pristine tropical african mountain forest along a geochemical gradient from mafic to felsic and a topographic gradient covering plateau, slope and valley positions. To do so we conducted a series of soil C fractionation experiments in combination with an analysis of the geochemical composition of soil and a sequential extraction of pedogenic oxides. Relationships between our target and predicting variables were investigated using a combination of regression analyses and dimension reduction. Here, we show that reactive secondary mineral phases drive SOC properties and stabilization mechanisms together with, and sometimes more strongly than, other mechanisms such as aggregation or C stabilization by clay content. Key mineral stabilization mechanisms for SOC were strongly related to soil geochemistry, differing across the study regions. These findings were independent of topography in the absence of detectable erosion processes. Instead, fluvial dynamics and changed hydrological conditions had a secondary control on SOC dynamics in valley positions, leading to higher SOC stocks there than at the non-valley positions. We also detected fossil organic carbon (FOC) at several sites, constituting up to 52.0 ± 13.2 % of total SOC stock in the C depleted subsoil. Interestingly, total SOC stocks for these soils did not exceed those of sites without FOC. Additionally, FOC decreased strongly towards more shallow soil depths, indicating decomposability of FOC by microbial communities under more fertile conditions. Regression analysis showed that variables affiliated with soil weathering, parent material geochemistry and soil fertility, together with soil depth, explained up to 75 % of the variability of SOC stocks and Δ14C. Furthermore the same variables explain 44 % of the variability in the relative abundance of C associated with microaggregates versus free silt and clay associated C fractions However, geochemical variables gained or retained importance for explaining SOC target variables when controlling for soil depth. We conclude that despite long-lasting weathering, geochemical properties of soil parent material leave a footprint in tropical soils that affects SOC stocks and mineral related C stabilization mechanisms. While identified stabilization mechanisms and controls are similar to less weathered soils in other climate zones, their relative importance is markedly different in the investigated tropical soils.
Patterns of microbial processes shaped by parent material and soil depth in tropical rainforest soils
Kidinda, Laurent; Olagoke, Folasade K.; Vogel, Cordula; et al. (2020)
Soil Discussions
Microbial processes are one of the key factors driving carbon (C) and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems, and are strongly driven by the equilibrium between resource availability and demand. In deeply weathered tropical rainforest soils of Africa, it remains unclear whether patterns of microbial processes differ between soils developed from geochemically contrasting parent materials. Here we show that resource availability across soil depths and regions from mafic to felsic geochemistry shape patterns of soil microbial processes. During a 120-day incubation experiment, we found that microbial biomass C and extracellular enzyme activity were highest in the mafic region. Microbial C limitation was highest in the mixed sedimentary region and lowest in the felsic region, which we propose is related to the strength of contrasting C stabilization mechanisms and varying C quality. None of the investigated regions and soil depths showed signs of nitrogen (N) limitation for microbial processes. Microbial phosphorus (P) limitation increased with soil depth but was similar across geochemical regions, indicating that subsoils in the investigated soils were depleted in rock-derived nutrients and are therefore dependent on efficient biological recycling of nutrients. Microbial C limitation was lowest in subsoils, indicating that subsoil microbes can significantly participate in C cycling and limit C storage if increased oxygen availability is prevalent. Using multivariable regressions, we demonstrate that microbial biomass C normalized to soil organic C content (MBCSOC) is controlled by soil geochemistry and substrate quality, while microbial biomass C normalized to soil weight (MBCSoil) is predominantly driven by resource distribution. We conclude that due to differences in resource availability, microbial processes in deeply weathered tropical rainforest soils greatly vary across geochemical regions which must be considered when assessing soil microbial processes in organic matter turnover models.

Publications 1 - 9 of 9

Journal: Soil Discussions

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