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Comparison on soil carbon stocks between urban and suburban topsoil in Beijing, China

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Abstract

The urban population and urbanized land in China have both increased markedly since the 1980s. Urban and suburban developments have grown at unprecedented rates with unknown consequences for ecosystem functions. In particular, the effect of rapid urbanization on the storage of soil carbon has not been studied extensively. In this study, we compared the soil carbon stocks of different land use types in Beijing Municipality. We collected 490 top-soil samples (top 20 cm) from urban and suburban sites within the Sixth Ring Road of Beijing, which cover approximately 2400 km2, and the densities of soil organic carbon (SOC), soil inorganic carbon (SIC), and total carbon (TC) were analyzed to determine the spatial distribution of urban and suburban soil carbon characteristics across seven land use types. The results revealed significant differences in soil carbon densities among land use types. Additionally, urban soil had significantly higher SOC and SIC densities than suburban soil did, and suburban shelterbelts and productive plantations had lower SIC densities than the other land use types. The comparison of coefficients of variance (CVs) showed that carbon content of urban topsoil had a lower variability than that of suburban topsoil. Further findings revealed that soil carbon storage increased with built-up age. Urban soil built up for more than 20 years had higher densities of SOC, SIC and TC than both urban soil with less than 10 years and suburban soil. Correlation analyses indicated the existence of a significantly negative correlation between the SOC, SIC, and TC densities of urban soil and the distance to the urban core, and the distance variable alone explained 23.3% of the variation of SIC density and 13.8% of the variation of TC density. These results indicate that SOC and SIC accumulate in the urban topsoil under green space as a result of the conversion of agricultural land to urban land due to the urbanization in Beijing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Shanghua Luo, Qizheng Mao & Keming Ma

  2. Center for Human-Environment System Sustainability, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Qizheng Mao

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  1. Shanghua Luo
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Correspondence to Keming Ma.

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Foundation item: Under the auspices of National Key Technology Research and Development Program (No. 2007BAC28B01), Innovation Project of State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology of China

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Luo, S., Mao, Q. & Ma, K. Comparison on soil carbon stocks between urban and suburban topsoil in Beijing, China. Chin. Geogr. Sci. 24, 551–561 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11769-014-0709-y

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