Century-scale wood nitrogen isotope trajectories from an oak savanna with variable fire frequencies

Trumper, Matthew L.; Griffin, Daniel; Hobbie, Sarah E.; Howard, Ian M.; Nelson, David M.; Reich, Peter B.; McLauchlan, Kendra K.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-4509-2020

Articles | Volume 17, issue 18

Biogeosciences, 17, 4509–4522, 2020

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-4509-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Biogeosciences, 17, 4509–4522, 2020

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-17-4509-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 17, issue 18

Research article 15 Sep 2020

Research article | 15 Sep 2020

Century-scale wood nitrogen isotope trajectories from an oak savanna with variable fire frequencies

Matthew L. Trumper et al.

Data sets

Frequent burning causes large losses of carbon from deep soil lay - 65 ers in a temperate savanna A. F. A. Pellegrini, K. K. McLauchlan, S. E. Hobbie, M. C. Mack, A. L. Marcotte, D. M. Nelson, S. S. Perakis, P. B. Reich, and K. Whittinghill https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.02v6wwq07

Soil net N mineralization over five incubation periods: Effect of Burning Patterns on Vegetation in the Fish Lake Burn Compartments ver 9 P. Reich https://doi.org/10.6073/pasta/02f57c86b556b47f8127a98990a4bae7

Data supporting: Century-scale wood nitrogen isotope trajectories from an oak savanna with variable fire frequencies Matthew L. Trumper, Daniel Griffin, Sarah E. Hobbie, Ian M. Howard, David M. Nelson, Peter B. Reich, and Kendra K. McLauchlan https://doi.org/10.13020/428b-8h51

Short summary

We developed century-scale records of wood nitrogen isotopes (δ¹⁵N) from 16 trees across a long-term savanna fire experiment. Results show similar long-term trajectories in three out of four burn treatments. Lack of evidence to support our hypotheses underscores the complexity of nitrogen dynamics inferred from wood δ¹⁵N. This is the first study to our knowledge to investigate multi-decadal effects of fire at different return intervals on wood δ¹⁵N, a potential proxy of nitrogen availability.