Browsing by Subject "Bodenatmung"

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    Effects of elevated soil temperature and altered precipitation patterns on N-cycling and production of N2O and CO2 in an agricultural soil
    (2016) Latt, Yadana Khin; Kandeler, Ellen
    Both temperature and precipitation regimes are expected to change with climate change and are, at the same time, major environmental factors regulating biogeochemical cycles in terrestrial ecosystems. Therefore, crop water availability, soil nitrogen transformations, losses, and uptake by plants as well as CO2 emissions from soil are likely to be changed by climate change. Agriculture is known to be one of the most important human activities for releasing significant amounts of N2O and CO2 to the atmosphere. Due to global concern about the changing climate, there has been a great interest in reducing emissions of N2O and CO2 from agricultural soils. CO2 and N2O are produced in soil primarily by microbial processes. Their production and emissions from the soil are controlled by a number of environmental variables including inorganic N availability, soil temperature and water content. Agricultural management practices, such as irrigation, affect these environmental variables and thus have the potential to dramatically alter N2O and CO2 emissions from the soil. The present study is titled "Effects of elevated soil temperature and altered precipitation patterns on N cycling and production of N2O and CO2 in an agricultural soil". The objectives of this study were: to determine the effects of elevated soil temperature on N cycling in a winter wheat cropping system, to investigate the short-term response of N2O and CO2 fluxes during rewetting of soils after extended dry periods in summer, and to determine the effects of different degrees of rewetting on the CO2 emission peaks after rewetting in laboratory incubations. In the 1st experiment, we used the Hohenheim Climate Change (HoCC) experiment in Stuttgart, Germany, to test the hypothesis that elevated soil temperature will increase microbial N cycling, plant N uptake and wheat growth. In the HoCC experiment, soil temperature is elevated by 2.5°C at 4 cm depth. This experiment was conducted at non-roofed plots (1m x 1m) with ambient (Ta) and elevated (Te) soil temperature and with ambient precipitation. In 2012, winter wheat (Triticum aestivum) was planted. C and N concentrations in soil and aboveground plant fractions, soil microbial biomass C and N (Cmic and Nmic), mineral N content (NH4+ - N and NO3- - N), potential nitrification and enzymes involved in nitrogen cycling were analyzed at soil depths of 0-15 and 15-30 cm at five sampling dates. The plants were rated weekly for their phenological development and senescence behavior. We found that an increase in soil temperature by 2.5oC did not have a persistent effect on mineral N content and the activity of potential nitrification within the soil. Plant growth development also did not respond to increased soil temperature. However microbial biomass C and N, and some enzyme activities involved in N-cycling, tended to increase under elevated soil temperature. Overall, the results of this study suggested that soil warming by 2.5oC slightly stimulates soil N cycling but does not alter plant growth development. In the 2nd experiment, in 2013, the effects of a change in the amount and frequency of precipitation patterns on N2O and CO2 emissions were studied after the two dry periods in summer in the HoCC experiment. N2O and CO2 gas samples were taken from four subplots (1m x 1m) of each roofed plot exposed to ambient (Ta) or elevated (Te) soil temperature and four precipitation manipulations (ambient plot, reduced precipitation amount, reduced precipitation frequency, and reduced precipitation amount and frequency). We found that CO2 emissions were affected only by temperature, but not by precipitation pattern. It can be said that N2O and CO2 emissions after rewetting of dry soil were not altered by changing precipitation patterns during dry periods in summer. In the year 2014, using laboratory incubations, we also measured the short-term response of CO2 production to a rewetting of dry soil to different volumetric water contents for 24 hours. This study was conducted by manipulating microcosms with agricultural soil from the HoCC experimental site, which had been exposed to severe drought conditions of three months duration for each of the last six years. The results showed that CO2 production increased with increases in the water content of soils by rewetting at 5%, 15%, 25%, 35% and 45% VWC. With increasing water additions more peaks in CO2 production were detected and different temporal patterns of CO2 emission were affected by adding different amounts of water. It might be due to the fact that with greater water additions successively larger pore sizes were water filled and therefore different bacterial groups located in different pore size classes might have contributed to CO2 production. In summary, the results from field study suggested that climate warming will affect N cycling in soils in an agricultural cropping system. The results from both field and microcosm rewetting experiments contribute to a better understanding of C and N dynamics in soil by investigating the effect of varying soil water content on the emission of N2O and CO2.
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    Microbial regulation of soil organic matter decomposition at the regional scale
    (2018) Ali, Rana Shahbaz; Kandeler, Ellen
    The fate of soil organic carbon (SOC) is one of the greatest uncertainties in predicting future climate. Soil microorganisms, as primary decomposers of SOC, control C storage in terrestrial ecosystems by mediating feedbacks to climate change. Even small changes in microbial SOC decomposition rates at the regional scale have the potential to alter land-atmospheric feedbacks at the global scale. Despite their critical role, the ways in which soil microorganisms may change their abundances and functions in response to the climate change drivers of soil temperature and moisture is unclear. Additionally, most existing C models do not consider soil microorganisms explicitly as drivers of decomposition, one consequence of which is large variability in predicted SOC stock projections. This demonstrates the need for a better mechanistic understanding of microbial SOC decomposition at large scales. This thesis was designed to clarify the role of microbial SOC decomposition dynamics in response to climate change factors in two geographically distinct areas and land-use types. The hypothesis was that microbial communities would be adapted to climatic and edaphic conditions specific to each area and to the SOC organic quality in each land-use and would therefore exhibit distinct responses to soil temperature and moisture variations. Three studies were performed to address the goals of this thesis. The first study aimed to clarify temporal patterns of degradation in C pools that varied in complexity by modelling in situ potentials of microbially produced extracellular enzymes. Temperature and moisture sensitivity patterns of C cycling enzymes were followed over a period of thirteen months. The second study investigated group-specific temperature responses of bacteria and fungi to substrate quality variations through an additional incubation experiment. Here, complex environments were mimicked in order to determine the dependence of microbial responses not only on environmental conditions, but also under conditions of inter- and intra-specific community competition. Changes in microbial community composition, abundance, and function were determined at coarse (phospholipid fatty acid – PLFA, ergosterol) and relatively fine resolutions (16S rRNA, taxa-specific quantitative PCR, fungal ITS fragment). A third study investigated 1) the spatial variability of temperature sensitivity of microbial processes, and 2) the scale-specificity and relative significance of their biotic and physicochemical controls at landscape (two individual areas, each ca. 27 km2) and regional scales (pooled data of two areas). Strong seasonal dependency was observed in the temperature sensitivities (Q10) of hydrolytic and oxidative enzymes, whereas moisture sensitivity of β-glucosidase activities remained stable over the year. The range of measured enzyme Q10 values was similar irrespective of spatial scale, indicating a consistency of temperature sensitivities of these enzymes at large scales. Enzymes catalyzing the recalcitrant SOC pool exhibited higher temperature sensitivities than enzymes catalyzing the labile pool; because the recalcitrant C pool is relatively large, this could be important for understanding SOC sensitivity to predicted global warming. Response functions were used to model temperature-based and temperature and moisture-based in situ enzyme potentials to characterize seasonal variations in SOC decomposition. In situ enzyme potential explained measured soil respiration fluxes more efficiently than the commonly used temperature-respiration function, supporting the validity of our chosen modelling approach. As shown in the incubation experiment, increasing temperature stimulated respiration but decreased the total biomass of bacteria and fungi irrespective of substrate complexity, indicating strong stress responses by both over short time scales. This response did not differ between study areas and land-uses, indicating a dominant role of temperature and substrate quality in controlling microbial SOC decomposition. Temperature strongly influenced the responses of microbial groups exhibiting different life strategies under varying substrate quality availability; with soil warming, the abundance of oligotrophs (fungi and gram-positive bacteria) decreased, whereas copiotrophs (gram-negative) increased under labile C substrate conditions. Such an interactive effect of soil temperature and substrate quality was also visible at the taxon level, where copiotrophic bacteria were associated with labile C substrates and oligotrophic bacteria with recalcitrant substrates. Which physicochemical and biological factors might explain the observed alterations in microbial communities and their functions in response to climate change drivers at the regional scale was investigated in the third study. Here, it was shown that the soil C:N ratio exerted scale-dependent control over soil basal respiration, whereas microbial biomass explained soil basal respiration independent of spatial scale. Factors explaining the temperature sensitivity of soil respiration also differed by spatial scale; extractable organic C and soil pH were important only at the landscape scale, whereas soil texture as a control was independent of spatial scale. In conclusion, this thesis provides an enhanced understanding of the response of microbial C dynamics to climate change at large scales by combining field measurements with innovative laboratory assays and modelling tools. Component specific degradation rates of SOC using extracellular enzyme measurements as a proxy, group-specific temperature sensitivities of microbial key players, and the demonstrated scale-specificity of factors controlling microbial processes could potentially improve the predictive power of currently available C models at regional scale.