Abstract
Background and aims
Subtropical seasonally dry forests from South America are now experiencing one of the highest rates of forest-cover change globally. These changes may affect the dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC) including long-term stabilization processes, with profound consequences for the fertility and carbon storage of these ecosystems.
Methods
In order to explore the effect of different land-use regimes on SOC dynamics, we determined the amount and quality of plant litter, the amount and quality (lignin and carbohydrate content) of SOC, and the soil basal respiration rates across seasonally dry Chaco forests of Argentina.
Results
Changes in land-use regimes significantly reduced the amount of litter but not its quality. As a consequence, the SOC content was also reduced together with SOC quality. Unexpectedly, we found a higher CO2 release per SOC unit in soils with lower amount and quality of SOC.
Conclusions
The results presented here show a clear effect of different land-use regimes on SOC dynamics through a reduction in the amount and quality of SOC. Additionally, we found that potential microbial activity is somehow disconnected from substrate quantity and quality, suggesting that the molecular structure of SOC is not significantly affecting long-term soil stabilization processes across these seasonally-dry ecosystems.
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Acknowledgments
We are grateful to land dwellers, owners and managers for allowing us to work in their properties and to the Secretaría de Ambiente de Córdoba. This study is a contribution of the MIRA program from the Rhone-Alpes region, France; and of Núcleo DiverSus, endorsed by DIVERSITAS and the IGBP Global Land Project, and supported by FONCyT (PICT-0365 and PICT-0554), CONICET, SECyT - Universidad Nacional de Córdoba and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research (IAI) CRN 2015 and SGP-CRA2015 (which were supported by the US National Science Foundation grants GEO-0452325 and GEO-1138881). GC postdoc grant was supported by Fundación Bunge y Born Argentina and CONICET. We acknowledge Charlène Thedevuide for carrying out the lignin and CH analyses and to two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on this manuscript.
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Conti, G., Kowaljow, E., Baptist, F. et al. Altered soil carbon dynamics under different land-use regimes in subtropical seasonally-dry forests of central Argentina. Plant Soil 403, 375–387 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-016-2816-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-016-2816-2