Sponsor
Funding for this study was provided by awards from the U.S. National Science Foundation Division of Environmental Biology (Award #2020443) and Long-Term Ecological Research (Award #1637685) programs. Funding for this work was provided in part by the Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station and the Hatch Program of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture.
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
Citation Details
Possinger, A. R., Driscoll, C. T., Green, M. B., Fahey, T. J., Johnson, C. E., Koppers, M. M. K., Martel, L. D., Morse, J. L., Templer, P. H., Uribe, A. M., Wilson, G. F., & Groffman, P. M. (2025). Increasing soil respiration in a northern hardwood forest indicates symptoms of a changing carbon cycle. Communications Earth & Environment, 6(1).