Chinese Bulletin of Botany ›› 2020, Vol. 55 ›› Issue (3): 308-317.DOI: 10.11983/CBB19231

• EXPERIMENTAL COMMUNICATIONS • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Patterns and Influence Factors of Fine Root Turnover in Forest Ecosystems

Jianing Zhao1,Yun Liang2,Ying Liu3,Yujue Wang1,Qianru Yang1,Chunwang Xiao1,*()   

  1. 1College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Minzu University of China, Beijing 100081, China
    2State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China
    3College of Geomatics, Xi’an University of Science and Technology, Xi’an 710054, China
  • Received:2019-11-29 Accepted:2020-02-26 Online:2020-05-01 Published:2020-07-06
  • Contact: Chunwang Xiao

Abstract: Root turnover is a key process in the carbon cycle of terrestrial ecosystems, and plays an important role in studying soil carbon pool changes and global climate change. Various methods for measuring root turnover rate have been described, from which highly variable results are obtained. Moreover, the studies on root turnover in large regional scales are not sufficient, making the patterns of root turnover in global forest ecosystem still not clear. This study integrates the fine root turnover spatial pattern of five forest types in the world by collecting literature data and unifying the calculation method of turnover rate. Combined with soil physical and chemical properties and climate data, several factors driving the fine root turnover of forest ecosystems are obtained. We show that there was a significant difference in the different forest ecosystems and the fine root turnover rate almost decreased with the increase of latitude. The fine root turnover rate of forest ecosystems was positively correlated to the mean annual temperature and the mean annual precipitation. The fine root turnover rate of forest ecosystems was positively correlated to the soil organic carbon content but negatively correlated to soil pH. This study provides a model to study the fine root turnover laws and mechanisms of forest ecosystems.

Key words: fine root turnover, global forest scale, climate factor, soil properties