11/24/2008
Improved Approach to Calculating Soil Respiration
Summary
Soil respiration is increasingly recognized as a critical factor in the global carbon cycle. The temperature sensitivity of soil respiration is one of the most important processes in the terrestrial carbon cycling and carbon-climate interactions. To date, it has been difficult to estimate sensitivity parameters from measurements, leading to uncertainties in coupled carbon-climate simulations. In the November 14 edition of the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, scientists from ORNL report a new approach called the “localized ratio fitting” (LRF) which is shown to isolate and remove confounding effects and thus accurately estimate the “true” temperature sensitivity of soil respiration. This improved calculation method suggests that a long-held assumption of seasonal variation in temperature sensitivity may be an artifact of earlier calculation methods.
References
Gu L, Hanson PJ, Post WM, Liu Q (2008) A novel approach for identifying the true temperature sensitivity from soil respiration measurements. Global Biogeochemical Cycles 22, GB4009, doi:10.1029/2007GB003164