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Fine root growth and contribution to soil carbon in a mixed mature Pinus koraiensis forest

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Abstract

Background and aims

Forest fine roots contribute substantially to carbon cycling, and old growth forests have an important role in the global carbon budget. We, hence, studied temporal variation in fine root production and turnover in an old forest.

Methods

Fine root dynamics were investigated, using sequential soil cores for 6 years, and related to rainfall and air temperature in a mixed mature broad-leaved Pinus koraiensis forest in northeastern China.

Results

The mass, production, mortality, and disappearance of fine roots showed intra-annual variation. Monthly live and dead fine root mass were significantly positively correlated with meteorological conditions of the previous month. Monthly fine root production was associated with air temperature of the current month. The intra-annual pattern of fine root production was similar to that of net primary production and opposite to that of leaf litterfall. Total fine root production accounted for 25 % of net primary production, and the fine root input to soil carbon was 1.2 times larger than the leaf litterfall.

Conclusions

Our results indicate tight linkages between fine roots and meteorological conditions. The important role of fine roots in forest carbon budget suggests that forest carbon flux estimations need to take fine root dynamics into account.

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Acknowledgments

Financial support was obtained from the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDA05050201, XDA05020300), the State Key Program of National Natural Science of China (Grant No. 41330530), and the State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology (Grant No. LFSE2013-01). We thank Shutang Wang, Yuan Xu, Yan Zhang, Xubing Cheng, Jing Zhao, Lufu Zhao and Xichang He for assistance in field and laboratory work, and Melissa Dawes for improving the English.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Agronomy, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang, 110866, China

    Cunguo Wang

  2. State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, 110016, China

    Cunguo Wang, Shijie Han, Junhui Zhang & Mai-He Li

  3. Shanghai Institute of Technology, Shanghai, 201418, China

    Yumei Zhou

  4. Research Station of Changbai Mountain Forest Ecosystems, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Antu, 133613, China

    Junhui Zhang, Xingbo Zheng & Guanhua Dai

  5. Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Zuercherstrasse 111, CH-8903, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Mai-He Li

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  1. Cunguo Wang
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  2. Shijie Han
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  3. Yumei Zhou
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  4. Junhui Zhang
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  6. Guanhua Dai
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  7. Mai-He Li
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Correspondence to Shijie Han.

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Responsible Editor: Kees Jan van Groenigen.

Appendix

Appendix

Fig. 5
figure 5

Monthly average rainfall and air temperature from April to October

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Fig. 6
figure 6

The inter-annual variation in annual rainfall and annual mean air temperature in the years when soil was sampled (1992, 2002, 2004, 2009, 2010, 2012)

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Fig. 7
figure 7

The coefficient of variation (CV) for monthly fine root L-mass (MLM), D-mass (MDM), production (MP), mortality (MM) and disappearance (MD) in the sampling years

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Wang, C., Han, S., Zhou, Y. et al. Fine root growth and contribution to soil carbon in a mixed mature Pinus koraiensis forest. Plant Soil 400, 275–284 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-015-2724-x

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