TY - JOUR T1 - The global-scale temperature and moisture dependencies of soil organic carbon decomposition: an analysis using a mechanistic decomposition model JF - Biogeochemistry Y1 - 2006 A1 - Ise, T. A1 - Moorcroft, P. R. KW - boreal forests KW - carbon cycling KW - climate change KW - climate-change KW - co2 KW - cycle feedbacks KW - decomposition KW - land-use KW - matter KW - modeling KW - q10 KW - Respiration KW - sensitivity KW - turnover KW - vegetation dynamics AB -

Since the decomposition rate of soil organic carbon (SOC) varies as a function of environmental conditions, global climate change is expected to alter SOC decomposition dynamics, and the resulting changes in the amount of CO2 emitted from soils will feedback onto the rate at which climate change occurs. While this soil feedback is expected to be significant because the amount of SOC is substantially more than the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, the environmental dependencies of decomposition at global scales that determine the magnitude of the soil feedback have remained poorly characterized. In this study, we address this issue by fitting a mechanistic decomposition model to a global dataset of SOC, optimizing the model's temperature and moisture dependencies to best match the observed global distribution of SOC. The results of the analysis indicate that the temperature sensitivity of decomposition at global scales (Q(10)=1.37) is significantly less than is assumed by many terrestrial ecosystem models that directly apply temperature sensitivity from small-scale studies, and that the maximal rate of decomposition occurs at higher moisture values than is assumed by many models. These findings imply that the magnitude of the soil decomposition feedback onto rate of global climate change will be less sensitive to increases in temperature, and modeling of temperature and moisture dependencies of SOC decomposition in global-scale models should consider effects of scale.

VL - 80 SN - 0168-2563 N1 -

090VJTimes Cited:52Cited References Count:61

JO - BiogeochemistryBiogeochemistry ER -