中文 |

Research Progress

Regional EEA Variation Can be Well Explained by Soil Properties in the Karst Regions

Jul 14, 2017

Soil extracellular enzymes are crucial in biogeochemical cycling and ecosystem functioning. The patterns and determinants of extracellular enzyme activities (EEAs) can provide useful information about soil functioning and its responses to human disturbances (e.g., land use change) or environmental changes.

Over the past decades, many previous studies have been conducted to investigate the levels and spatiotemporal variation of EEA at small scales, however, uncertainty exists in large-scale regions with alkaline soils.

Recently, Dr. CHEN Hao and his team from the Institute of Subtropical Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISA) collected the soil samples from secondary forest, shrubland, grassland and cropland underlain by either dolomite or limestone and analyzed the activities of seven soil extracellular enzymes related to carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus cycling in a regional- scale karst area, southwest.

The results showed that the enzyme activity profiles were significantly different between dolomite and limestone or among the four land use types according to multi-response permutation procedure analysis. Among the soil properties, soil moisture, contents of silt and total nitrogen were the most important variables responsible for EEA variation.

"Variation partitioning indicated that soil properties, spatial variables and land use together explained 43% of EEA variation. Soil properties explained the largest proportion of EEA variation (36.5%)," said Dr CHEN Hao, the first author of the paper.

This work was supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC0502404), the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2015CB452703), Hundred Talent Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y523101030), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41571295, 31500405, 31400462).

The result suggests that regional EEA variation can be well explained by soil properties in the karst regions and has been published in the journal European Journal of Soil Biology with the title of "Determinants of soil extracellular enzyme activity in a karst region, southwest China", (80) September- June 2017, pages 69- 76. Details could be found at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S116455631730047X.

 

Fig. 1. Ordination biplot of redundancy analysis (RDA) of EEAs constrained by all explanatory variables contributing significantly (p < 0.05) to EEA variation from the three groups of explanatory variables, i.e., soil properties, spatial variables and land use. (Image by CHEN Hao)

Contact Us
  • 86-10-68597521 (day)

    86-10-68597289 (night)

  • 86-10-68511095 (day)

    86-10-68512458 (night)

  • cas_en@cas.cn

  • 52 Sanlihe Rd., Xicheng District,

    Beijing, China (100864)

Copyright © 2002 - Chinese Academy of Sciences