Soil warming in a cool-temperate mixed forest with peat soil enhanced heterotrophic and basal respiration rates but Q₁₀ remained unchanged

Abstract. We conducted soil warming experiment in a cool-temperate forest with peat soil in northern Japan, during the snowless seasons of 2007–2009. Our objective was to determine whether or not the heterotrophic respiration rate and the temperature sensitivity would change by soil warming. We elevated the soil temperature by 3 °C at 5 cm depth by means of overhead infrared heaters and continuously measured soil CO₂ fluxes by using a fifteen-channel automated chamber system. Trenching treatment was also carried out to separate heterotrophic respiration and root respiration from the total soil respiration. The fifteen chambers were divided into three groups each with five replications for the control, unwarmed-trenched, and warmed-trenched treatments. We found that heterotrophic respiration contributed 71 % of the total soil respiration with the remaining 29 % accounted to autotrophic respiration. Soil warming enhanced heterotrophic respiration by 74 % (mean 6.11 ± 3.07 S.D. μmol m⁻² s^–1) as compared to the unwarmed-trenched treatment (mean 3.52 ± 1.74 μmol m⁻² s^–1). Soil CO₂ efflux, however, was weakly correlated with soil moisture, probably because the volumetric soil moisture (33–46 %) was within a plateau region for root and microbial activities. The enhancement in heterotrophic respiration with soil warming in our study suggests that global warming will accelerate the loss of carbon from forested peatlands more seriously than other upland forest soils. On the other hand, soil warming did not cause significant change in the temperature sensitivity, Q₁₀, (2.79 and 2.74 determined using hourly efflux data for unwarmed- and warmed-trenched, respectively), but increased their basal respiration rate at 0 °C (0.93 and 1.21 μmol m⁻² s⁻¹, respectively). Results suggest that if we predict the soil heterotrophic respiration rate in future warmer environment using the current relationship between soil temperature and heterotrophic respiration, the rate can be underestimated.