Stable carbon isotope characteristics of different plant species and surface soil in arid regions

Abstract

The stable carbon isotope composition in surface soil organic matter (δ¹³C_soil) contains integrative information on the carbon isotope composition of the standing terrestrial plants (δ¹³C_leaf). In order to obtain valuable vegetation information from the δ¹³C of terrestrial sediment, it is necessary to understand the relationship between the δ¹³C value in modern surface soil and the standing vegetation. In this paper, we studied the δ¹³C value in modern surface soil organic matter and standing vegetation in arid areas in China, Australia and the United States. The isotopic discrepancy between δ¹³C_soil and δ¹³C_leaf of the standing dominant vegetation was examined in those different arid regions. The results show that the δ¹³C_soil values were consistently enriched compared to the δ¹³C_leaf. The δ¹³C_leaf values were positively correlated with δ¹³C_soil, which suggests that the interference of microorganisms and hydrophytes on the isotopic composition of surface soil organic matter during soil organic matter formation could be ignored in arid regions. The averaged discrepancy between δ¹³C_soil and δ¹³C_leaf is about 1.71‰ in Tamarix L. in the Tarim Basin in China, 1.50‰ in Eucalytus near Orange in Australia and 1.22‰ in Artemisia in Saratoga in the United States, which are different from the results of other studies. The results indicate that the discrepancies in the δ¹³C value between surface soil organic matter and standing vegetation were highly influenced by the differences in geophysical location and the dominant species of the studied ecosystems. We suggest that caution should be taken when organic matter δ¹³C in terrestrial sediment is used to extract paleovegetation information (C₃/C₄ vegetation composition), as the δ¹³C in soil organic matter is not only determined by the ratio of C₃/C₄ species, but also profoundly affected by climate change induced variation in the δ¹³C in dominant species.

Keywords

stable carbon isotope composition / surface soil / vegetation composition

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 40671195, 40421101 and 90502008), K C Wong Education Foundation (Hong Kong), and Postdoctoral Sciences Foundation of China (20060390193).

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