Sensitivity of organic matter mineralisation to water availability: role of solute diffusivity and the ‘Birch effect’
Weiwen Qiu
A * , Denis Curtin A , Wei Hu A and Mike Beare A
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations
A The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, Private Bag 4704, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand.
Soil Research 61(1) 9-19 https://doi.org/10.1071/SR22013
Submitted: 17 January 2022 Accepted: 19 June 2022 Published: 11 July 2022
© 2023 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND)
Abstract
Context: Several functions are used to describe the effects of soil water content on organic matter mineralisation. A meta-analysis of published studies identified relative water content (RWC; available water relative to the soil’s available water holding capacity) as the best water descriptor for N mineralisation.
Aims: To evaluate RWC as a predictor of C and N mineralisation in New Zealand soils; and to investigate how solute diffusivity and the ‘Birch effect’ may help to explain this relationship.
Methods: Three agricultural soils (0–15 cm), differing in water holding capacity were incubated (8-week; 20°C) under a range of RWCs to measure carbon (respiration) and net N mineralisation. After 4 weeks, a subset of samples from each treatment were re-wetted to field capacity for a further 4-weeks to quantify the respiration response to re-wetting.
Key results: For all three soils, there was a linear relationship between respiration and RWC where the C respired at the wilting point (RWC = 0) was ∼25–30% of that at field capacity (RWC = 1.0). Results from a solute diffusivity model suggested that a decrease in microbial substrate supply, owing to restricted diffusion of dissolved organic compounds, contributed to moisture-induced decline in respiration. A respiration flush was not observed when RWC was >0 at re-wetting. Nitrogen mineralisation was non-linearly related to RWC, with small decreases in RWC below 1.0 (optimum) having a greater effect on N, than C, mineralisation.
Conclusions: RWC may be a reliable ‘water modifier’ to describe the influence of soil moisture on respiration. Further work is recommended to verify the RWC vs net N mineralisation relationship observed in this study.
Keywords: Birch effect, first-order model, incubation, net N mineralisation, relative water content, soil respiration, SOM mineralisation-moisture relationship, substrate diffusion.
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