Forest floor and mineral soil respiration rates in a Northern Minnesota red pine chronosequence

Authors

Matthew Powers, Oregon State University
Randall K Kolka, USDA Forest Service
John Bradford, US Geological Survey Southwest Biological Science Center
Brian Palik, USDA Forest Service Northern Research Station
Martin F. Jurgensen, Michigan Technological UniversityFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

12-29-2017

Department

College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science

Abstract

We measured total soil CO₂ efflux (R_S) and efflux from the forest floor layers (R_FF) in red pine (Pinus resinosa Ait.) stands of different ages to examine relationships between stand age and belowground C cycling. Soil temperature and R_S were often lower in a 31-year-old stand (Y31) than in 9-year-old (Y9), 61-year-old (Y61), or 123-year-old (Y123) stands. This pattern was most apparent during warm summer months, but there were no consistent differences in R_FF among different-aged stands. R_FF represented an average of 4–13% of total soil respiration, and forest floor removal increased moisture content in the mineral soil. We found no evidence of an age effect on the temperature sensitivity of R_S, but respiration rates in Y61 and Y123 were less sensitive to low soil moisture than R_S in Y9 and Y31. Our results suggest that soil respiration’s sensitivity to soil moisture may change more over the course of stand development than its sensitivity to soil temperature in red pine, and that management activities that alter landscape-scale age distributions in red pine forests could have significant impacts on rates of soil CO₂ efflux from this forest type.

Publisher's Statement

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Publisher’s version of record: https://doi.org/10.3390/f9010016

Publication Title

Forests

Recommended Citation

Powers, M., Kolka, R., Bradford, J., Palik, B., & Jurgensen, M. F. (2017). Forest floor and mineral soil respiration rates in a Northern Minnesota red pine chronosequence. Forests, 9(1), 16. http://doi.org/10.3390/f9010016
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/michigantech-p/1923

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Version

Publisher's PDF