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Relevance of large litter bag burial for the study of leaf breakdown in the hyporheic zone

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Abstract

Particulate organic matter is the major source of energy for most low-order streams, but a large part of this litter is buried within bed sediment during floods and thus become poorly available for benthic food webs. The fate of this buried litter is little studied. In most cases, measures of breakdown rates consist of burying a known mass of litter within the stream sediment and following its breakdown over time. We tested this method using large litter bags (15 × 15 cm) and two field experiments. First, we used litter large bags filled with Alnus glutinosa leaves (buried at 20 cm depth with a shovel) in six stations within different land-use contexts and with different sediment grain sizes. Breakdown rates were surprisingly high (0.0011–0.0188 day−1) and neither correlate with most of the physico-chemical characteristics measured in the interstitial habitats nor with the land-use around the stream. In contrast, the rates were negatively correlated with a decrease in oxygen concentrations between surface and buried bags and positively correlated with both the percentage of coarse particles (20–40 mm) in the sediment and benthic macro-invertebrate richness. These results suggest that the vertical exchanges with surface water in the hyporheic zone play a crucial role in litter breakdown. Second, an experimental modification of local sediment (removing fine particles with a shovel to increase vertical exchanges) highlighted the influence of grain size on water and oxygen exchanges, but had no effect on hyporheic breakdown rates. Burying large litter bags within sediments may thus not be a relevant method, especially in clogged conditions, due to changes induced through the burial process in the vertical connectivity between surface and interstitial habitats that modify organic matter processing.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Julien Tremblay (INRA U3E Laboratory), Catherine Grimaldi (INRA, Rennes, SAS Laboratory), Francois Burel (UMR-CNRS Ecobio), Jacques Baudry (INRA, Rennes, SAD laboratory) and Bernard Montuelle (Cemagref Lyon) for valuable discussions. This study was supported by the DIVA program of the French Ministry of Ecology and Sustainable Development, the PAPIER project of the ECosphére COntinentale (ECOGER) program, and the InBioProcess project of the ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) Biodiversity 2006 program.

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  1. Pierre Marmonier & Christophe Piscart

    Present address: Université de Lyon, Université Lyon 1, UMR-CNRS 5023 ‘LEHF’, Bâtiment Forel, 43 Boulevard du 11 Novembre 1918, 69622, Villeurbanne, France

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université de Rennes 1, UMR-CNRS 6553 ‘Ecobio’, Campus Beaulieu, 263 Av. du Général Leclerc, 35042, Rennes cedex, France

    Pierre Marmonier, Christophe Piscart & Pierre Emmanuel Sarriquet

  2. Unité Experimentale d’Ecologie et d’Ecotoxicologie (U3E), INRA-Agrocampus Ouest, Route de Saint Brieuc, 35000, Rennes Cedex, France

    Didier Azam

  3. EcoLab (Laboratoire d’écologie fonctionnelle), Université de Toulouse, UPS, INP, 29 rue Jeanne Marvig, 31055, Toulouse, France

    Eric Chauvet

  4. EcoLab, CNRS, 31055, Toulouse, France

    Eric Chauvet

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  1. Pierre Marmonier
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Correspondence to Pierre Marmonier.

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Marmonier, P., Piscart, C., Sarriquet, P.E. et al. Relevance of large litter bag burial for the study of leaf breakdown in the hyporheic zone. Hydrobiologia 641, 203–214 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-009-0082-5

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