Published In

Communications Earth & Environment

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-1-2025

Subjects

Soil chemistry, Carbon cycle (Biogeochemistry), Nitrogen cycle

Abstract

Soil carbon dioxide (CO2) flux, or soil respiration, is a critical control on net ecosystem carbon (C) balance. Using long-term (2002-2020) measurements at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (New Hampshire, U.S.), we show that soil respiration rates have notably increased since ~2015. In 2020, cumulative summer respiration flux was approximately 90% higher than the average summer flux over the 2002–2015 period. The increase in soil respiration cannot be explained directly by temperature or pH change alone. We also found that heterotrophic microbial C mineralization and microbial biomass C have also increased rapidly since ~2015, pointing towards an increase in the bioavailability of organic C substrates. We suggest that these observations are consistent with a hypothetical increase in plant allocation of C belowground in response to changing climatic and soil conditions. Quantification of interactions among co-occurring global change factors (e.g., warming temperatures, increasing atmospheric CO2, and nutrient limitation) is needed to predict how the soil C reservoir will continue to respond to global environmental changes.

Rights

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Locate the Document

https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02405-y

DOI

10.1038/s43247-025-02405-y

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/43692

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

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