Forest floor accumulation is a key process that influences ecosystem carbon cycling. Despite the evidence suggesting that tree diversity and soil carbon are positively correlated, most soil carbon studies typically omit the response of the forest floor carbon to tree diversity loss. Relying upon the Experimental Platform for Tree Diversity, Functional Characteristics and Ecosystem Functions, established in Longyan, Fujian, Wan Xiaohua, a senior experimentalist with the School of Geographical Sciences, the School of Carbon Neutrality Future Technology of FNU, and her other group members evaluated how tree species richness affects litterfall production, the forest floor decay rate and forest floor mass. The results show that greater tree species richness leads to higher forest floor accumulation at the soil surface through increasing litterfall production – positively linked to functional trait identity (i.e. community-weighted mean functional trait) rather than functional diversity – and unchanged forest floor decay due to two opposite effects canceling each other out, which means tree species richness increases forest floor decay rate through increasing litterfall production while decreasing forest floor decay rate by increasing litter species richness. Compared with the mesh-bag method used to study litterfall decay rate, the mass balance method used in this study to calculate litterfall decay rate offers a more detailed research result of understanding the dynamic relationship between tree species diversity and floor litterfall decay rate in the forest, which may help understand how tree species diversity affects ecosystem carbon cycling and services better.
The research, entitled “Functional identity drives tree species richness-induced increases in litterfall production and forest floor mass in young tree communities”, was published in the international authoritative journal in plant science New Phytologist.
FNU is the first organization of the paper, with Wan Xiaohua, a doctor of FNU as the first author, Huang Zhiqun, a researcher of FNU as the corresponding author, and Francois-Xavier Joly, a professor with University of Stirling of UK as the co-author. The work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Paper link: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.19216
(Translated by Chen JunFan/ Reviewed by Xie Xiujuan)