Abstract
Understanding how assimilated carbon (C) is allocated in forest ecosystems is crucial for process-based models and accurate prediction of global C cycling. We tracked the fate of recently assimilated C of Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) and birch (Betula platyphylla) among various C pools in a temperate forest for 27 days using the 13CO2 pulse labeling approach. Birch had low carbon use efficiency (CUE) and allocated 66.9% of the recently assimilated C to metabolism and respiration, and had faster turnover rate of recently assimilated C in the labile pool of leaves and soil compared to pine. Pine had high CUE and allocated 12.3% of the recently assimilated C to metabolism and respiration. Our study showed that pine, as the dominate species of the climax stage, has a more conservative strategy of C use than the pioneer species birch, which may be one of the underlying mechanisms of higher soil carbon sequestration in pine forests compared to birch forests.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Ziping Liu and Shasha Liu for their assistance in laboratory analyses.
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This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41901058, 41971058, 31971510) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2412021ZD016).
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WHX and EB: designed the experiment; WHX, BP, PJ and SLL: performed the experiment; QC, WHX, CW and EB: analyzed the data; QC and EB: wrote and revised the manuscript.
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Chang, Q., Xu, W., Peng, B. et al. Dynamic and allocation of recently assimilated carbon in Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) and birch (Betula platyphylla) in a temperate forest. Biogeochemistry 160, 395–407 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-022-00962-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-022-00962-4