Abundance and composition of plant biomass as potential controls for mire net ecosytem CO2 exchange

We compared the amount and composition of different aboveground biomass (BM) fractions of four mires with their net ecosystem CO2 exchange (NEE) measured by eddy covariance. We found clear differences in response of green biomass (GBM) of plant functional types (PFTs) to water table (WT), which resulted in larger spatial variation in GBM within a mire than variation between mires. GBM varied between mires from 126 ± 7 to 336 ± 16 g·m–2 (mean ± SE), while within mire variation at largest was from 157 ± 17 to 488 ± 20 g·m–2 (mean ± SE). GBM of dominant PFTs appeared to be better in explaining the peak growing season NEE than the total BM or GBM of a mire. The differences in photosynthetic capacity between PTFs had a major role, and thus a smaller GBM with different species composition could result in higher NEE than larger GBM. Vascular plant GBM, especially that of sedges, appeared to have a high impact on NEE. Eleven PFTs, defined here, appeared to capture well the internal variation within mires, and the differences in GBM between communities were explained by the water table response of PFTs. Our results suggest the use of photosynthesizing BM, separated into PFTs, in modelling ecosystem carbon exchange instead of using just total BM.