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Fine root biomass and turnover in southern taiga estimated by root inclusion nets

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Abstract

Fine roots play an important part in forest carbon, nutrient and water cycles. The turnover of fine roots constitutes a major carbon input to soils. Estimation of fine root turnover is difficult, labour intensive and is often compounded by artefacts created by soil disturbance. In this work, an alternative approach of using inclusion nets installed in an undisturbed soil profile was used to measure fine root production and was compared to the in-growth core method. There was no difference between fine root production estimated by the two methods in three southern taiga sites with contrasting soil conditions and tree species compositions in the Central Forest State Biosphere Reserve, Russia. Expressed as annual production over standing biomass, Norway spruce fine root turnover was in the region of 0.10 to 0.24 y-1. The inclusion net technique is suitable for field based assessment of fine root production. There are several advantages over the in-growth core method, due to non-disturbance of the soil profile and its potential for very high rate of replication.

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Acknowledgements

This project has been supported by the EU (INCO 013388, OMRISK). We thank Mr G.Turner and Mr M. Bambrick for help during sampling and root analyses and Dr Angelo Caimi for stand survey data.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NERC Centre for Population Biology, Imperial College London, Ascot, SL5 7PY, UK

    Martin Lukac

  2. Environment Centre for Wales, Bangor University, Bangor, LL57 2UW, UK

    Douglas L. Godbold

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  1. Martin Lukac
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  2. Douglas L. Godbold
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Correspondence to Martin Lukac.

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Responsible Editor: Tjeerd Bouma.

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Lukac, M., Godbold, D.L. Fine root biomass and turnover in southern taiga estimated by root inclusion nets. Plant Soil 331, 505–513 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-009-0271-z

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