TITLE:
Spatial Variations of Soil Respiration in Arid Ecosystems
AUTHORS:
Gang Liu, Rei Sonobe, Quan Wang
KEYWORDS:
Soil Respiration, Spatial Variation, Arid Ecosystems, Geostatistics, Temperature, Moisture
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Ecology,
Vol.6 No.4,
March
30,
2016
ABSTRACT: Soil respiration releases a major carbon flux back
to atmosphere and thus plays an important role in global carbon cycling. Soil
respiration is well known for its significant spatial variation in terrestrial
ecosystems, especially in fragile ecosystems of arid land, where vegetation is
distributed sparsely and the climate changes dramatically. In this study, soil
respiration in three typical arid ecosystems: desert ecosystem (DE),
desert-farmland transition ecosystem (TE) and farmland ecosystem (FE) in an arid
area of northwestern China were studied for their spatial variations in 2012
and 2013. Along with soil respiration (SR), soil surface temperature (ST), soil
moisture (SM) and soil electrical conductivity (ECb) were also recorded to
investigate the spatial variations and the correlations among them. The results
revealed that averaged soil respiration rate was much lower in DE than those in
TE and FE. No single factor could adequately explain the variation of soil
respiration, except a negative relationship between soil temperature and soil respiration
in FE (P