Abstract
Understanding how assimilated carbon (C) is allocated in forest ecosystems is crucial for process-based models and accurate prediction of global C cycling. We tracked the fate of recently assimilated C of Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) and birch (Betula platyphylla) among various C pools in a temperate forest for 27 days using the 13CO2 pulse labeling approach. Birch had low carbon use efficiency (CUE) and allocated 66.9% of the recently assimilated C to metabolism and respiration, and had faster turnover rate of recently assimilated C in the labile pool of leaves and soil compared to pine. Pine had high CUE and allocated 12.3% of the recently assimilated C to metabolism and respiration. Our study showed that pine, as the dominate species of the climax stage, has a more conservative strategy of C use than the pioneer species birch, which may be one of the underlying mechanisms of higher soil carbon sequestration in pine forests compared to birch forests.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Ziping Liu and Shasha Liu for their assistance in laboratory analyses.
Funding
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 41901058, 41971058, 31971510) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2412021ZD016).
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WHX and EB: designed the experiment; WHX, BP, PJ and SLL: performed the experiment; QC, WHX, CW and EB: analyzed the data; QC and EB: wrote and revised the manuscript.
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Chang, Q., Xu, W., Peng, B. et al. Dynamic and allocation of recently assimilated carbon in Korean pine (Pinus koraiensis) and birch (Betula platyphylla) in a temperate forest. Biogeochemistry 160, 395–407 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-022-00962-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-022-00962-4