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Responses of soil carbon and nitrogen to successive land use conversion in seasonally frozen zones

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Abstract

Background and aims

Policy-oriented successive land use conversion intensively occurred in seasonally frozen zones of China during the past five decades. However, responses of soil carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) to land use conversion under cold temperate climates are not fully understood. The objective was to characterize C and N variations following a succession of forest, dryland and paddy.

Methods

Soil cores were collected for 6 layers with a 10 cm increment from three adjacent chronosequences to determine concentrations of soil organic carbon (SOC), total nitrogen (TN), dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and alkaline hydrolysable nitrogen (HN). Analysis of variance with multivariate general linear model was operated on data sets.

Results

Significant losses of SOC and TN storages subject to land use conversion were merely confined within 0 – 10 cm layer, decreasing by 16 % and 38 % for forest to dryland and by 23 % and 43 % for forest to paddy, respectively. Cultivation also influenced SOC and TN stocks at 20 – 40 cm depth for dryland and 20 – 60 cm depth for paddy with increases by 38 Mg C ha−1 and 2.8 Mg N ha−1 for forest to dryland, and by 56 Mg C ha−1 and 4.1 Mg N ha−1 for forest to paddy, respectively.

Conclusion

Successive land use conversion from forest to cropland affected C and N levels in deeper layers, demonstrating the high potentials of subsoil in sequestrating C and N. The extents of cultivation-induced SOC and TN redistribution along soil profile varied among different agricultural systems. DOC and HN changes interpreted SOC and TN changes with land use, presenting high involvements of soluble compartments in SOC and TN variations. The net variation in SOC/TN ratio effectively indicated C and N changes when dryland was converted to paddy.

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Acknowledgments

This research was financially supported by projects of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41171384, 41271414 and 41301529) and the GLOCOM project (EU FP7-People, Grant No. PIRSES-GA-2010-269233). We are grateful to staff in Land Consolidation and Rehabilitation Center of Bawujiu Farm, for their help on field sampling. We also greatly appreciate the responsible editor and the two anonymous reviewers whose comments have dramatically improved this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Resource, Environment and Tourism, Capital Normal University, Beijing, 100048, China

    Xiao Pu

  2. State Key Laboratory of Remote Sensing Science, School of Geography, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Xiao Pu & Shengtian Yang

  3. Department of Chemistry, Umeå University, Umeå, 90187, Sweden

    Xiao Pu & Mats Tysklind

  4. School of Environment, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Hongguang Cheng, Chunye Lin, Lu Lu & Jing Xie

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  1. Xiao Pu
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Correspondence to Hongguang Cheng.

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Responsible Editor: Ingrid Koegel-Knabner.

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Pu, X., Cheng, H., Tysklind, M. et al. Responses of soil carbon and nitrogen to successive land use conversion in seasonally frozen zones. Plant Soil 387, 117–130 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-014-2284-5

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