Soil carbon and nitrogen stores and storage potential as affected by land-use.pdf

Biogeochemistry (2007) 82:127-138 DOI 10.1007/s10533-006-9058-y Soil carbon and nitrogen stores and storage potential as affected by land-use in an agro-pastoral ecotone of northern China Zhiyong Zhou * Osbert J. Sun * Jianhui Huang i Linghao Li * Ping Liu * Xingguo Han Received: 4 February 2006/Accepted: 8 September 2006/Published online: 20 October 2006 ? Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2006 Abstract Equilibrium carbon stock is the result of a balance between inputs and outflows to the pool. Changes in land-use are likely to alter such balance, resulting in different carbon stores under different land-use types in addition to the impacts of global climate change. In an agro-pastoral ecotone of Inner Mongolia, northern China, we investigated productivity and belowground car bon and nitrogen stores under six different types of land-uses, namely free grazing (FG), grazing exclusion (GE), mowing (MW), corn plantation (CP), fallow (FL), and alfalfa pasture (AP), and their impacts on litter and fine roots in semiarid grassland ecosystems. We found that there were great variations in aboveground net primary production (ANPP) across the six land-use types, with CP having markedly high ANPP; the FG had significantly reduced soil organic carbon (SOC) and nitrogen stores (SON) to 100 cm depth compared with all other types of land uses, while Z. Zhou 0. J. Sun (F1) J. Huang L. Li P. Liu X. Han Laboratory of Quantitative Vegetation Ecology, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, 20 Nanxincun, Xiangshan, Haidian District, Beijing 100093, China e-mail: osbertsun@ibcas.ac.cn Z. Zhou P. Liu Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China very little litter accumulation was found on sites of the FG and CP. The top 20 cm of soils accounted for about 80% of the root carbon and nitrogen, with very little roots being found below 50 cm. About 60% of SOC and SON were stored in the top 30 cm layer. L