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δ 15N of soil nitrogen pools and their dynamics under decomposing leaf litters in a suburban native forest subject to repeated prescribed burning in southeast Queensland, Australia

  • Soils, Sec 1 • Soil Organic Matter Dynamics and Nutrient Cycling • Research Article
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Abstract

Purpose

Global environmental changes could affect forest productivity and thus organic matter input to soil via litterfall. We conducted a 9-month litter decomposition experiment to examine the effect of litter removal and addition on soil nitrogen (N) dynamics in a subtropical eucalypt forest subject to prescribed burning.

Materials and methods

Two litter treatments were applied: addition of double litter rates and without any litter addition. In situ 15N pool dilution method was used to determine soil gross N transformation rates, and δ 15N of soil inorganic N pools and their dynamics were also measured.

Results and discussion

The results showed that the addition of decomposing litters had no significant effect on soil net and gross N mineralization and nitrification rates. Soil N rates showed a pronounced seasonal pattern with higher rates in summer and lower rates in winter, which could be explained by the seasonal variation of environmental conditions such as temperature but not soil water content in this study. The soils had significantly higher δ 15N in NO3 −-N than in NH4 +-N after removing the forest floor, which might result from gaseous N losses via nitrification, denitrification and NO3 −-N leaching during the experimental period.

Conclusions

Soil N transformations were not significantly affected by decomposing litters during the 9-month of decomposition. Our findings demonstrate that long-term studies of litter decomposition combined with repeated measurement of soil N transformation rates are needed to fully understand the seasonal patterns of soil N cycling and its response to decomposing litters in forest ecosystems.

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Acknowledgments

This work was sponsored by grants from the Australian Research Council, and partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1133006) and the Ministry of Education of China as an innovative research team (Grant No. IRT13024). Geoffrey Lambert, Qi Jiang, Yanbin Hao, Haitao Zhao, Yan Zhao, Chenyuan Xu and Vaeno Vigulu were greatly acknowledged for their assistance in the field work. We also thank Rene Diocares, Radoslaw Bak and Carolyn Polson for their technical supports in sample analyses. Yuzhe Wang was supported through a 2-year scholarship under the State Scholarship Fund of China to study as a joint PhD student at Griffith University in Australia.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Pollution Processes and Environmental Criteria, College of Environmental Sciences and Engineering, Nankai University, Tianjin, 300071, China

    Yuzhe Wang & Qixing Zhou

  2. Environmental Futures Research Institute and School of Natural Sciences, Griffith University, Nathan, Brisbane, Queensland, 4111, Australia

    Yuzhe Wang, Zhihong Xu, Junqiang Zheng & Kadum M. Abdullah

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

    Junqiang Zheng

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  1. Yuzhe Wang
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  2. Zhihong Xu
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  3. Junqiang Zheng
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  4. Kadum M. Abdullah
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  5. Qixing Zhou
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Correspondence to Zhihong Xu or Qixing Zhou.

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Responsible editor: Zucong Cai

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Wang, Y., Xu, Z., Zheng, J. et al. δ 15N of soil nitrogen pools and their dynamics under decomposing leaf litters in a suburban native forest subject to repeated prescribed burning in southeast Queensland, Australia. J Soils Sediments 15, 1063–1074 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-015-1117-3

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