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Soil carbon stocks and quality across intact and degraded alpine wetlands in Zoige, east Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

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Abstract

The wetlands on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau are experiencing serious degradation, with more than 90,000 hectares of marshland converted to wet meadow or meadow after 40 years of drainage. However, little is known about the effects of wetland conversion on soil C stocks and the quality of soil organic carbon (SOC) (defined by the proportion of labile versus more resistant organic carbon compounds). SOC, microbial biomass carbon, light fraction organic carbon (LFOC), dissolved organic carbon, and the chemical composition of SOC in the soil surface layer (0–10 cm), were investigated along a wetland degradation gradient (marsh, wet meadow, and meadow). Wetland degradation caused a 16 % reduction in the carbon stocks from marsh (178.7 ± 15.2 kg C m−2) to wet meadow (150.6 ± 21.5 kg C m−2), and a 32 % reduction in C stocks of the 0–10 cm soil layer from marsh to meadow (122.2 ± 2.6 kg C m−2). Wetland degradation also led to a significant reduction in SOC quality, represented by the lability of the carbon pool as determined by a density fractionation method (L LFOC), and a significant increase in the stability of the carbon pool as reflected by the alkyl-C:O-alkyl-C ratio. 13C NMR spectroscopy showed that the labile form of C (O-alkyl-C) declined significantly after wetland degradation. These results assist in explaining the transformation of organic C in these plateau wetland soils and suggest that wetland degradation not only caused SOC loss, but also decreased the quality of the SOC of the surface soil.

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Abbreviations

SOM:

Soil organic matter

SOC:

Soil organic carbon

TN:

Total nitrogen

C:N:

Carbon to nitrogen ratio

BD:

Soil bulk density

LFOC:

Light fraction organic carbon

LFN:

Light fraction nitrogen

MBC:

Microbial biomass carbon

MBN:

Microbial biomass nitrogen

DOC:

Dissolved organic carbon

DON:

Dissolved organic nitrogen

13C CP/MAS NMR:

Solid-state 13C cross polarization with magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance

DO C:N:

DOC-to-DON ratio

LF C:N:

LFOC-to-LFN ratio

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge the support of Dangzhou Hamo, Ta Baima, as well as the Roige National Wetland Reserve for their assistance in field sampling. We would also like to thank Professor Max Finlayson and three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on this manuscript. Thanks to Beverly Young and Sarah Furlotte for their improvements on the language.

Funding

This study was funded by the Research Institute of Forestry New Technology (CAFINT2011C09), the Chinese Ministry of Finance (No. 201204201), and China’s National Natural Science Foundation (No. 31200370). J Wu would like to thank Humber River Basin research initiative, Agricultural Research Initiative of NL, and Grenfell Campus’s Start-up research fund for research funding.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Wetland Research, Chinese Academy of Forestry, Beijing, 100091, People’s Republic of China

    Junwei Luan, Lijuan Cui, Hongtao Song & Qiongfang Ma

  2. Sichuan Academy of Forestry, Chengdu, 610081, People’s Republic of China

    Chenghua Xiang

  3. Sustainable Resource Management, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Grenfell Campus, Corner Brook, NL, A2H 6P9, Canada

    Junwei Luan & Jianghua Wu

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  1. Junwei Luan
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  2. Lijuan Cui
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  4. Jianghua Wu
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Correspondence to Junwei Luan or Lijuan Cui.

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Luan, J., Cui, L., Xiang, C. et al. Soil carbon stocks and quality across intact and degraded alpine wetlands in Zoige, east Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Wetlands Ecol Manage 22, 427–438 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11273-014-9344-8

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