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Experimental flooding shifts carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus pool distribution and microbial activity

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Abstract

Flooding transforms the soil environment, impacting small-scale controls on mineral associated carbon (C), nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) persistence and mobilization. Yet during flood events, mineral associated C, N, and P may not respond in the same way, such that soluble C, N, and P concentrations and stoichiometry may change potentially impacting microbial activity. Using a laboratory incubation approach, we investigated how flooding impacts C, N, and P pool distribution and microbial activity across a 1-week flood event and after drying. We found that all three mineral associated pools responded dynamically to flooding, increasing and decreasing throughout the flood with a 5.9% increase in mineral associated C and 32.5% decrease in residual P post flood. However, mineral associated C, N, and P each shifted at different temporal points, indicating that they are likely responding to separate destabilization mechanisms working at different temporal scales. Soluble C increased by 57% and soluble N decreased by 72% at the beginning of the flood which remained post-flood. However, soluble P behaved more similarly to the mineral associated pool, shifting throughout the flood period. The microbial community maintained and even increased their exo-cellular activity throughout the flood period. Our research demonstrates that the mineral associated pool can shift with short-term flooding altering the composition and quantity of the soluble pool and microbial activity.

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The data and code that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the financial support for this research provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC)-CREATE Climate-Smart Soils grant (#528274-2019) funding HPL and MR and the Canadian Agri-Food Policy Institute 2020–2022 Doctoral Fellowship program to HPL. This work was also supported by a NSERC Discovery Grant (RGPIN-2021-03250) and a Fonds de recherche du Québec–Nature et technologies grant 2022-NC-297557 to CMK.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Natural Resource Sciences, Macdonald Campus of McGill University, Sainte- Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec, H9X 3V9, Canada

    Hannah P. Lieberman, Maia Rothman & Cynthia M. Kallenbach

  2. Crop Sciences Department, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, 61801, IL, USA

    Maia Rothman

  3. Department of Geography, McGill University, Montréal, Québec, H3A 0B9, Canada

    Christian von Sperber

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  1. Hannah P. Lieberman
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Contributions

HPL, CVS, and CMK conceived of and designed the study and HPL and MR carried out the experiment and collected and analyzed the experimental data. HPL wrote the first draft of the manuscript with contributions from CVS and CMK. All authors contributed to the interpretation of the data, writing and revising manuscript drafts and are accountable for the accuracy and integrity of all aspects of the work.

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Lieberman, H.P., Rothman, M., von Sperber, C. et al. Experimental flooding shifts carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus pool distribution and microbial activity. Biogeochemistry 165, 75–90 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-023-01061-8

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