Abstract
Peatlands contain enormous carbon stocks, but the stability of this carbon is variable. Peatlands can vary in tree cover from completely open to forested with associated differences in peat quality. Peat quality, or potential for mineralization, is a contributing factor affecting how the carbon balance of peatland ecosystems could change with climate or land use changes. We compared the peat quality of open peatlands dominated by Sphagnum mosses to forested, or silvic, peatlands dominated by black spruce and tamarack or northern white cedar to quantify the effects of different carbon sources on peat quality. We used Fourier-transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR) to analyze peat properties throughout the depth profile of 30 peat cores across the hemi-boreal Upper Great Lakes region. We found that tree cover was associated with differences in both surficial and deep peat quality. Silvic peat had lower peat quality than Sphagnum peat as shown by FTIR indices. Sphagnum peat also had significantly higher peat quality at the surface compared to at depth. However, silvic peat showed no significant difference with depth in any indices. Our results indicate that the dominant plant functional type is a strong driver of peat quality as we identified key differences between silvic and Sphagnum peatlands. These relatively local differences are similar in magnitude to those found across biomes comparing tropical swamps to boreal Sphagnum peatlands. This implies that the dominant plant functional type (e.g. tree, shrub, graminoid, or moss) may be more important to peat quality than species identity—or even latitude—in peatlands.
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Data Availability
The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the Pangaea data repository (https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.942942). In the event that data is inaccessible from Pangaea, it will be made available by the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Sam Kurkowski and Andrew Robertson for all of their help with FTIR analyses, and Kate Heckman for her expertise. We additionally thank two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback, which contributed to greatly improving the manuscript.
Funding
We acknowledge the support and funding that we received from the USDA Forest Service, Hiawatha National Forest, and in-kind support from the USDA Forest Service, Northern Research Station. Funding from the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, USDA, McIntire-Stennis program, MTU graduate school, and the Ecosystem Science Center (MTU) also supported this study.
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All authors contributed to the conception of this study. Rodney Chimner and Evan Kane funded the study. Dominic Uhelski led material preparation, data collection, and analysis. Dominic Uhelski wrote the first draft, all authors contributed to editing previous drafts of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Uhelski, D.M., Kane, E.S. & Chimner, R.A. Plant functional types drive Peat Quality differences. Wetlands 42, 51 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-022-01572-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-022-01572-4