Abstract
Aims
Elemental stoichiometry of soil is a useful indicator of nutrient constraints. The aim of this study is to assess the relative contributions of local-scale determinants to the soil carbon/nitrogen ratio (C:N) and nitrogen/phosphorus ratio (N:P) in a 25 ha temperate forest plot.
Methods
Leaf litter biomass at 967 soil sampling points was predicted using mapped tree distribution and leaf litter data (150 traps) for seven tree species. Boosted regression trees (BRT) were used to examine the relative contribution of local-scale variables to key elemental stoichiometry of soil. These variables included leaf litter input, neighbor species composition, soil pH and moisture, and topography.
Results
Both biotic and abiotic variables influenced soil C:N and N:P ratios, but abiotic factors had a greater influence. Soil pH was the most important predictor of soil C:N and N:P with a strong positive correlation. Topography and soil moisture explained more of the local-scale variability of soil C:N and N:P ratios than tree composition and leaf litter inputs.
Conclusions
Our results suggest soil pH was a better predictor of local-scale spatial variability of soil elemental stoichiometry than tree composition and leaf litter inputs in temperate forests. These results improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the heterogeneity of soil nutrients.
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Abbreviations
- BA:
-
Basal area
- BRT:
-
Boosted Regression Tree analysis
- CBS:
-
Changbaishan (Forest area)
- DBH:
-
Diameter at breast height
- LLF:
-
Leaf litterfall mass
- RAC:
-
Residual autocovariate
- SAC:
-
Spatial autocorrelation
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Acknowledgments
This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31570432 and 41301057), Program of International Co-operation, Chinese Academy of Sciences (151221KYSB20130003), Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y5YZX151YD), and CFERN & GENE Award Funds on Ecological Paper. We would like to thank Tom McRae, Xingguo Han and Smithsonian CTFS - ForestGEO Analytical Workshop V participants for their valuable suggestions to improve the manuscript. We would like to thank Mathieu Jonard and Qingqing Zhao for sharing R codes of the leaf dispersal model. We would also like to thank Alison Beamish at the University of British Columbia for her assistance with English language and grammatical editing of the manuscript. We would also like to thank the CBS plot census and data management teams, and especially thank Yuqiang Zhao, Xu Kuang, Guodong Liu, Baizhang Song and Xichang He for their assistance with the field work and data collection.
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Suo, Y., Yuan, Z., Lin, F. et al. Local-scale determinants of elemental stoichiometry of soil in an old-growth temperate forest. Plant Soil 408, 401–414 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-016-2939-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-016-2939-5