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Research article2023Peer reviewedOpen access

Climatic water availability modifies tree functional diversity effects on soil organic carbon storage in European forests

Osei, Richard; Titeux, Hugues; del Rio, Miren; Ruiz-Peinado, Ricardo; Bielak, Kamil; Bravo, Felipe; Collet, Catherine; Cools, Corentin; Cornelis, Jean-Thomas; Droessler, Lars; Heym, Michael; Korboulewsky, Nathalie; Lof, Magnus; Muys, Bart; Najib, Yasmina; Nothdurft, Arne; Pach, Maciej; Pretzsch, Hans; Ponette, Quentin

Abstract

Forest stand and environmental factors influence soil organic carbon (SOC) storage, but little is known about their relative impacts in different soil layers. Moreover, how environmental factors modulate the impact of stand factors, particularly species mixing, on SOC storage, is largely unexplored. In this study, conducted in 21 forest triplets (two monocultures of different species and their mixture on the same site) distributed in Europe, we tested the hypothesis that stand factors (functional identity and diversity) have stronger effects on topsoil (FF + 0-10 cm) C storage than environmental factors (climatic water availability, clay + silt content, oxalate-extractable Al-Al-ox) but that the opposite occurs in the subsoil (10-40 cm). We also tested the hypothesis that functional diversity improves SOC storage under high climatic water availability, clay + silt contents, and Al-ox. We characterized functional identity as the basal area proportion of broadleaved species (beech and/or oak), and functional diversity as the product of broadleaved and conifer (pine) proportions. The results show that functional identity was the main driver of topsoil C storage, while climatic water availability had the largest control on subsoil C storage. Functional diversity decreased topsoil C storage under increasing climatic water availability, but the opposite was observed in the subsoil. Functional diversity effects on topsoil C increased with increasing clay + silt content, while its effects on subsoil C were negative at increasing Al-ox content. This suggests that functional diversity effect on SOC storage changes along gradients in environmental factors and the direction of effects depends on soil depth.

Keywords

Soil organic carbon; Forest ecosystem services; Triplets; Oxalate-extractable metals; Context-dependency effects; Functional diversity

Published in

European Journal of Forest Research
2023, Volume: 142, number: 5, pages: 1099-1111
Publisher: SPRINGER

    UKÄ Subject classification

    Forest Science
    Ecology

    Publication identifier

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10342-023-01579-4

    Permanent link to this page (URI)

    https://res.slu.se/id/publ/122802