Publication
Title
Importance of nondiffusive transport for soil $CO_{2}$ efflux in a temperate mountain grassland
Author
Abstract
 Soil respiration and its biotic and abiotic drivers have been an important research topic in recent years. While the bulk of these efforts has focused on the emission of CO2 from soils, the production and subsequent transport of CO2 from soil to atmosphere received far less attention. However, to understand processes underlying emissions of CO2 from terrestrial ecosystems, both processes need to be fully evaluated. In this study, we tested to what extent the transport of CO2 in a grassland site in the Austrian Alps could be modeled based on the common assumption that diffusion is the main transport mechanism for trace gases in soils. Therefore, we compared the CO2 efflux calculated from the soil CO2 concentration gradient with the CO2 efflux from chamber measurements. We used four commonly used diffusion-driven models for the flux-gradient approach. Models generally underestimated the soil chamber effluxes and their amplitudes, indicating that processes other than diffusion were responsible for the transport of CO2. We further observed that transport rates correlated well with irradiation and, below a soil moisture content of 33%, with wind speed. This suggests that mechanisms such as bulk soil air transport, due to pressure pumping or thermal expansion of soil air due to local surface heating, considerably influence soil CO2 transport at this site. Our results suggest that nondiffusive transport may be an important mechanism influencing diel and day-to-day dynamics of soil CO2 emissions, leading to a significant mismatch (1087% depending on the model used) between the two approaches at short time scales.
Language
English
Source (journal)
Journal of geophysical research : biogeosciences / American Geophysical Union [Washington, D.C.] - Hoboken, N.J., 2013, currens
Publication
Hoboken, N.J. : 2015
ISSN
2169-8953 [print]
2169-8961 [online]
Volume/pages
120:3(2015), p. 502-512
ISI
000353046200008
Full text (Publisher's DOI)
Full text (open access)
UAntwerpen
 Faculty/Department Research group Project info GHG-Europe - Greenhouse gas management in European Land use systems.The terrestrial Carbon cycle under Climate Variability and Extremes - a Pan-European synthesis. (CARBO-Extreme) Publication type Subject Affiliation Publications with a UAntwerp address