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Short-term responses of ecosystem carbon fluxes to experimental soil warming at the Swiss alpine treeline

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Abstract

Climatic warming will probably have particularly large impacts on carbon fluxes in high altitude and latitude ecosystems due to their great stocks of labile soil C and high temperature sensitivity. At the alpine treeline, we experimentally warmed undisturbed soils by 4 K for one growing season with heating cables at the soil surface and measured the response of net C uptake by plants, of soil respiration, and of leaching of dissolved organic carbon (DOC). Soil warming increased soil CO2 effluxes instantaneously and throughout the whole vegetation period (+45%; +120 g C m y−1). In contrast, DOC leaching showed a negligible response of a 5% increase (NS). Annual C uptake of new shoots was not significantly affected by elevated soil temperatures, with a 17, 12, and 14% increase for larch, pine, and dwarf shrubs, respectively, resulting in an overall increase in net C uptake by plants of 20–40 g C m−2y−1. The Q 10 of 3.0 measured for soil respiration did not change compared to a 3-year period before the warming treatment started, suggesting little impact of warming-induced lower soil moisture (−15% relative decrease) or increased soil C losses. The fraction of recent plant-derived C in soil respired CO2 from warmed soils was smaller than that from control soils (25 vs. 40% of total C respired), which implies that the warming-induced increase in soil CO2 efflux resulted mainly from mineralization of older SOM rather than from stimulated root respiration. In summary, one season of 4 K soil warming, representative of hot years, led to C losses from the studied alpine treeline ecosystem by increasing SOM decomposition more than C gains through plant growth.

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Acknowledgments

We thank K. Wetter, A. Moser, M. Pohl, and R. Köchli for their field assistance, N. Hajar for measuring DOC concentrations. The research platform Stillberg was financed by Velux foundation and a French “ANR-biodiversité” grant (project “Qdiv” led by Paul Leadley). M. Martin was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF; grant 315200-116861).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research (WSL), 8093, Birmensdorf, Switzerland

    Frank Hagedorn, Silvan Rusch, Alois Zürcher & Sonja Wipf

  2. WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Flüelastrasse 11, 7260, Davos, Switzerland

    Melissa Martin, Christian Rixen & Peter Bebi

  3. Paul-Scherrer Institut, 5232, Villigen-PSI, Switzerland

    Rolf T. W. Siegwolf

  4. Centre of Functional Ecology and Evolution, CEFE-CNRS, 1919 route de Mende, 34293, Montpellier, France

    Christophe Escape, Jacques Roy & Stephan Hättenschwiler

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  1. Frank Hagedorn
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  4. Silvan Rusch
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Correspondence to Frank Hagedorn.

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Hagedorn, F., Martin, M., Rixen, C. et al. Short-term responses of ecosystem carbon fluxes to experimental soil warming at the Swiss alpine treeline. Biogeochemistry 97, 7–19 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-009-9297-9

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