Sponsor
This research was supported by a private gift from Great Dismal Swamp Mitigation Bank in support of basic research, grant 70233 from North Carolina’s Water Resource Research Institute, a small grant for monitoring equipment from NC DENR, and a grant to E.S. Bernhardt from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science (BER) through the Coastal Center of the National Institute for Climatic Change Research at Tulane University. J. L. Morse was supported by a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Fellowship (FP916599), and M. Ardón was supported by NSF DBI-085576.
Published In
Journal of Geophysical Research
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-2012
Subjects
Land use -- Management -- Environmental aspects, Wetlands -- Management, Plant-soil relationships
Abstract
We examined relationships between denitrification (DNF) and nitrous oxide (N2O) fluxes and potentially important chemical and physical predictors to build a predictive understanding of gaseous N losses from coastal plain wetlands. We collected soil, gas, and pore water samples from 48 sampling locations across a large (440 ha) restored wetland, an adjacent drained agricultural field, and nearby forested wetlands every two months over two years. In summer and fall 2007, we measured soil DNF potential (21.6-3560 mg N m-3 d-1) and N2O efflux (-4.36-8.81 mg N m -2 d-1), along with 17 predictor variables. We developed statistical models for the most comprehensive subset of the data set (fall 2007) and used another subset (summer 2007) for cross-validation. Soil pH and total soil nitrogen were the best predictors of DNF potential (Radj2 = 0.68). A regression using carbon dioxide flux and soil temperature together with soil extractable NH4+ and DNF potential explained 85% of the variation in fall N2O fluxes. The model for DNF performed reasonably well when cross-validated with summer data (R2 = 0.40), while the N2O model did not predict summer N2O fluxes (R2 < 0.1). Poor model performance was likely due to nonlinear responses to high temperatures and/or higher and more variable root respiration by plants during the growing season, leading to overprediction of N2O flux. Our results suggest that soil DNF potential may be modeled fairly effectively from a small number of soil parameters, that DNF potential is uncorrelated with N2O effluxes, and that successful estimation of wetland N2O effluxes will require finer-scale models that incorporate seasonal dynamics.
Rights
Copyrighted by American Geophysical Union
DOI
10.1029/2011JG001923
Persistent Identifier
http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/13342
Citation Details
Morse, JL, Ardón, MM, Bernhardt, ES (2012). Using Environmental Variables and Soil Processes to Forecast Denitrification Potential and Nitrous Oxide Fluxes in Coastal Plain Wetlands Across Different Land Uses. Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol 117.
Description
This is the publisher's final PDF. Originally published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences (http://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/agu/jgr/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)2169-8961/)
*At the time of publication Jennifer L. Morse was affiliated with Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies