Abstract
Soil soluble nitrogen (N) is crucial to the N nutrition and productivity of plants. Consequently, understanding the factors that affect its pool size and composition is of considerable importance. Here, six typical forest types in northeast China were investigated to determine the dynamics of soil soluble N across seasons and plant communities, and the potential drivers. Soil free amino acids, NH4+, NO3−, dissolved organic N (DON) and a variety of soil characteristics were measured over the growing season (from May to September). Seasonality showed a stronger effect on the availability of soil inorganic N and free amino acids than vegetation. The coefficients of variation of soil inorganic N, amino acid-N and the potential drivers (moisture and DON) appeared to be greater for season, and the concentrations of these available N sources tended to be higher at the beginning than at the height of growing season. Potential soil drivers (e.g. moisture, microbial biomass-N and DON) and plant phenology together drove the seasonal dynamics of inorganic N and amino acid-N. Arginine, histidine, serine, leucine, aspartic acid, glycine, glutamic acid and proline composed the dominant soil amino acid pool in the temperate forest soils. The basic amino acids (arginine and histidine) were consistently dominant irrespective of vegetation and season, suggesting that selective sorption by the soil solid phase could play an important role in regulating the cycling of amino acid-N in these temperate forest ecosystems. This research indicates that changes in local soil properties, and plant phenology caused by seasonality, exert a powerful influence on the characteristics of plant-soil N cycling.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported financially by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2016YFA0600803); National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31370617); and the China Scholarship Council (CSC number 201906600036). All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Lei Gao, Paul W. Hill, Davey L. Jones, Yafen Guo, Fei Gao and Xiaoyang Cui. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Lei Gao and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript. We are also indebted to two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
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Gao, L., Hill, P.W., Jones, D.L. et al. Seasonality is more important than forest type in regulating the pool size and composition of soil soluble N in temperate forests. Biogeochemistry 150, 279–295 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-020-00698-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-020-00698-z