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Temperature Dependence of Soil Respiration Modulated by Thresholds in Soil Water Availability Across European Shrubland Ecosystems

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Abstract

Soil respiration (SR) is a major component of the global carbon cycle and plays a fundamental role in ecosystem feedback to climate change. Empirical modelling is an essential tool for predicting ecosystem responses to environmental change, and also provides important data for calibrating and corroborating process-based models. In this study, we evaluated the performance of three empirical temperature–SR response functions (exponential, Lloyd–Taylor and Gaussian) at seven shrublands located within three climatic regions (Atlantic, Mediterranean and Continental) across Europe. We investigated the performance of SR models by including the interaction between soil moisture and soil temperature. We found that the best fit for the temperature functions depended on the site-specific climatic conditions. Including soil moisture, we identified thresholds in the three different response functions that improved the model fit in all cases. The direct soil moisture effect on SR, however, was weak at the annual time scale. We conclude that the exponential soil temperature function may only be a good predictor for SR in a narrow temperature range, and that extrapolating predictions for future climate based on this function should be treated with caution as modelled outputs may underestimate SR. The addition of soil moisture thresholds improved the model fit at all sites, but had a far greater ecological significance in the wet Atlantic shrubland where a fundamental change in the soil CO2 efflux would likely have an impact on the whole carbon budget.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the INCREASE Project (http://increase.ku.dk) funded by the EC FP7-Infrastructure-2008-1 Grant Agreement 227628, and the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA K112576 and PD115637). ME and JP research was supported by the European Research Council Synergy Grant ERC-2013-SyG-610028 IMBALANCE-P, the Spanish Government Grant CGL2013-48074-P and the Catalan Government Grant SGR 2014-274. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Ecology and Botany, MTA Centre for Ecological Research, Alkotmany u. 2-4, Vácrátót, 2163, Hungary

    Eszter Lellei-Kovács, Zoltán Botta-Dukát, Edit Kovács-Láng & György Kröel-Dulay

  2. Department for Innovation in Biological, Agro-food and Forest Systems, University of Tuscia, Via San Camillo de Lellis, snc, 01100, Viterbo, Italy

    Giovanbattista de Dato & Gabriele Guidolotti

  3. CSIC, Global Ecology Unit, CREAF- CSIC-UAB, Cerdanyola del Vallès, 08193, Catalonia, Spain

    Marc Estiarte & Josep Peñuelas

  4. CREAF, Cerdanyola del Vallès, 08193, Catalonia, Spain

    Marc Estiarte & Josep Peñuelas

  5. Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, University of Amsterdam, PO Box 94240, 1090 GE, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Gillian R. Kopittke & Albert Tietema

  6. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, University of Copenhagen, 1958, Frederiksberg, Denmark

    Klaus Steenberg Larsen & Inger Kappel Schmidt

  7. Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Environment Centre Wales, Deiniol Road, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2UW, UK

    Andrew R. Smith & Alwyn Sowerby

  8. School of Environment, Natural Resources and Geography, Bangor University, Bangor, Gwynedd, LL57 2UW, UK

    Andrew R. Smith

  9. Council for Agricultural Research and Economics - Forestry Research Centre (CREA-SEL), V.le Santa Margherita, 80, 52100, Arezzo, AR, Italy

    Giovanbattista de Dato

  10. Institute of Agro-Environmental and Forest Biology (IBAF) National Research Council (CNR), Via Marconi 2, 05010, Porano, TR, Italy

    Gabriele Guidolotti

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  1. Eszter Lellei-Kovács
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  2. Zoltán Botta-Dukát
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  3. Giovanbattista de Dato
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  4. Marc Estiarte
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  5. Gabriele Guidolotti
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  6. Gillian R. Kopittke
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  7. Edit Kovács-Láng
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  9. Klaus Steenberg Larsen
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  10. Josep Peñuelas
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  11. Andrew R. Smith
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  13. Albert Tietema
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  14. Inger Kappel Schmidt
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Correspondence to Eszter Lellei-Kovács.

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EKL and ELK conceived the study; ELK, GDD, ME, GG, GRK, GKD, KSL, JP, ARS, AS, AT and IKS performed the research; BDZ and ELK analyzed the data; and ELK wrote the paper.

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Lellei-Kovács, E., Botta-Dukát, Z., de Dato, G. et al. Temperature Dependence of Soil Respiration Modulated by Thresholds in Soil Water Availability Across European Shrubland Ecosystems. Ecosystems 19, 1460–1477 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10021-016-0016-9

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