Abstract
Plant material enriched in stable isotopes such as 13C and 15N can provide detailed insights into the fate of carbon and nitrogen during litter decomposition on land and in water. Large amounts (>1 kg) of labelled material are often needed for partitioning isotopic tracers in food webs and quantifying elemental fluxes at the ecosystem scale. This chapter describes two procedures, leaf spraying and stem injection, to produce leaf litter homogenously labelled and highly enriched in 15N. Leaf spraying uses 15N-labelled urea applied as a mist to fully expanded and physiologically active leaves or to the whole tree canopy. The labelled urea is rapidly taken up by the leaves. The stem injection technique involves connecting a reservoir containing 15N-labelling solution (15N labelled NH4NO3) to a borehole in the stem extending to the xylem. The upward sap flow induced by transpiration carries the label to the leaves. The labelled leaves are harvested following natural senescence just before or after abscission. These techniques have proved useful for tracing the fate of litter N in forest soils and would also be valuable for analyzing N fluxes associated with decomposing litter in streams.
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Zeller, B., Bienaimé, S., Dambrine, E. (2020). Isotopic Labelling of Leaf Litter Nitrogen. In: Bärlocher, F., Gessner, M., Graça, M. (eds) Methods to Study Litter Decomposition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30515-4_56
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30515-4_56
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