Hydrobiologia

, Volume 806, Issue 1, pp 333–346 | Cite as

Responses of microbially driven leaf litter decomposition to stream nutrients depend on litter quality

  • Elliot Bastias
  • Miquel Ribot
  • Anna M. Romaní
  • Juanita Mora-Gómez
  • Francesc Sabater
  • Pilar López
  • Eugènia Martí
Primary Research Paper
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  • 299 Downloads

Abstract

The present study aims to understand how microbial decomposition of leaf litter from two riparian tree species differing in their quality varies among streams covering a gradient of nutrient concentrations. We incubated leaf litter from alder (Alnus glutinosa) and sycamore (Platanus × hispanica) in 3 streams with low human pressure and 2 streams influenced by wastewater treatment plant effluents. We quantified leaf litter decomposition rates (k) and examined the temporal changes in the leaf litter concentrations of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) throughout the incubation period. We measured the extracellular enzyme activities involved in degradation of C (i.e., cellobiohydrolase) and organic phosphorus (i.e., phosphatase). Results showed that alder k decreased with increasing nutrient concentrations, while sycamore decomposed similarly among streams. For both species, leaf litter N concentrations were positively related to in-stream dissolved N concentrations. However, we found different temporal patterns of leaf litter N concentrations between species. Finally, we found relevant differences in the enzymatic activities associated to each leaf litter species across the nutrient gradient. These results suggest that the intrinsic characteristics of the leaf litter resources may play a relevant role on the microbially driven leaf litter decomposition and mediate its response to dissolved nutrient concentrations across streams.

Keywords

Stream Leaf litter decomposition Leaf litter quality Nitrogen Phosphorus Microbial exoenzymatic activity 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank R. Ventosa for the chemical analyses done at the Nutrient Analysis Service of CEAB. We thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments contributed to improve the present study. The financial support was provided by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the MED-FORESTREAM (ref: CGL2011-30590-C02-02) project. E. Bastias was granted by a FPI PhD fellowship from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the MED-FORESTREAM project. M. Ribot was supported by a technical training contract also associated to MED-FORESTREAM project. Funding was provided by Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Grant No. BES-2012-053358).

Supplementary material

10750_2017_3372_MOESM1_ESM.docx (18 kb)
Supplementary material 1 (DOCX 17 kb)

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Copyright information

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Integrative Freshwater Ecology GroupCentre d’Estudis Avançats de Blanes (CEAB-CSIC)BlanesSpain
  2. 2.GRECO, Institut d´Ecologia Aquàtica, Departament de Ciències AmbientalsUniversitat de GironaGironaSpain
  3. 3.Department of Ecology, Faculty of BiologyUniversity of BarcelonaBarcelonaSpain

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