BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to determine response patterns and mechanisms of soil respiration to precipitation increases in subtropical regions. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Field plots in three typical forests [i.e. pine forest (PF), broadleaf forest (BF), and pine and broadleaf mixed forest (MF)] in subtropical China were exposed under either Double Precipitation (DP) treatment o...

Soil respiration is controlled by soil temperature, soil water, fine roots, microbial activity, and soil physical and chemical properties. Forest thinning changes soil temperature, soil water content, and root density and activity, and thus changes soil respiration. We measured soil respiration monthly and soil temperature and volumetric soil water continuously in a young ponderosa pine (Pinus ...

Based on the enclosed chamber method, soil respiration measurements of Leymus chinensis populations with four planting densities (30, 60, 90 and 120 plants/0.25 m) and blank control were made from July 31 to November 24, 2003. In terms of soil respiration rates of L. chinensis populations with four planting densities and their corresponding root biomass, linear regressive equations between soil...

Although increasing evidence has provided that soil respiration is strongly related to recent canopy photosynthesis, doubts remain as to the extent to which primary productivity controls soil respiratory and the speed of the link between soil respiration and photosynthesis. Based on the automated measurements of soil respiration and eddy covariance measurements of ecosystem photosynthesis (i.e....

[1] Changes in soil respiration, one of the major fluxes of global carbon cycling, could significantly slow down or accelerate the increase in atmospheric CO2, with consequent feedbacks to climate change. It is critical to understand how substrate availability regulates soil respiration in projecting the response of carbon cycling to changed climate. We conducted a clipping and shading experime...

Land-use change has a crucial influence on soil respiration, which further affects soil nutrient availability and carbon stock. We monitored soil respiration rates under different land-use types (tea gardens with three production levels, adjacent woodland, and a vegetable field) in Eastern China at weekly intervals over a year using the dynamic closed chamber method. The relationship between so...

Vegetation type plays an important role in regulating the temporal and spatial variation of soil respiration. Therefore, vegetation patchiness may cause high uncertainties in the estimates of soil respiration for scaling field measurements to ecosystem level. Few studies provide insights regarding the influence of vegetation types on soil respiration and its temperature sensitivity in an estuar...

Despite decades of research, how climate warming alters the global flux of soil respiration is still poorly characterized. Here, we use meta-analysis to synthesize 202 soil respiration datasets from 50 ecosystem warming experiments across multiple terrestrial ecosystems. We found that, on average, warming by 2 °C increased soil respiration by 12% during the early warming years, but warming-indu...

Continuous measurements of soil respiration and its components help us understand diurnal and seasonal variations in soil respiration and its mechanism. We continuously measured CO2 concentration at various depths in the soil and calculated surface CO2 efflux based on CO2 gradients and diffusivity in a young ponderosa pine plantation in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. We determined s...