The Relationship Between DOC Partition Coefficient and Mineral Soil C:N Ratio

Since our recent publication showing that soil C:N predicts DOC flux at local and global scales, an effort has been made to understand mechanisms controlling the relationship between the two variables. We have approached this at multiple scales, using soil batch experiments, soil column experiments, and long-term field manipulations. We present here the results from our batch adsorption experiment. Mineral soils from tropical (wet and moist) and temperate (coniferous and hardwood) forests were used to assess DOC adsorption by the initial mass isotherm approach. We found that the DOC partition co-efficient (m) which represents a soil's tendency to adsorb DOC is strongly and inversely related to mineral soil C:N ratio (R2 = 0.99 n = 10 p < 0.001). The intercept of the mass isotherm, or the desorption term, was positively related to mineral soil C:N ratio (R2 = 0.80 n = 10 p < 0.01), but we found that desorption of DOC was more closely correlated with equilibrium DOC concentration (R2 = 0.97 n = 10 p < 0.001) than with mineral soil C:N. The mass isotherm approach is also useful in calculating the reactive soil pool (RSP), the fraction of the soil pool of organic carbon that may be lost to leaching. The RSP was not significantly related to mineral soil C:N, but tropical soils tended to have a larger RSP than temperate soils. Although some of the tropical soils came from areas where the natural forest had been cleared, used for plantations and then abandoned, the relationship between DOC adsorption and mineral soil C:N was not compromised. Watershed soil C:N ratio is an excellent predictor of DOC export because soil C:N is related to physiochemical adsorption processes in mineral soils and biotic production of DOC in organic soil horizons. It appears that soil C:N is a relatively robust predictor of soil solution DOC concentration and surface water DOC export for ecosystems undergoing environmental stress.