Chemical Properties, Decomposition, and Methane Production of Tertiary Relict Plant Litters: Implications for Atmospheric Trace Gas Production in the Early Tertiary

Throughout the early Tertiary (ca. 65-38 Ma) Taxodiaceae-dominated (redwood) wetland forests occupied the high latitudes and were circumpolar in their distribution. Many of these forests had high standing biomass with moderate primary productivity. The geographic extent and amount of Tertiary coals and fossil forests throughout Arctic Canada suggests large areas of wetland forests that may have cycled substantial quantities of carbon, particularly methane until they were replaced by cold tolerant Pinus, Picea, and Larix following climatic cooling associated with the Terminal Eocene Event. To test this hypothesis we compared physiochemical properties, decomposition, and trace gas production of litter from extant Metasequoia, Pinus, Picea, and Larix. Initial results from plantation-grown trees indicate Metasequoia litter is a better source of labile organic substrate than pinaceous litter. Metasequoia litter contained the least lignin and highest amounts of water-soluble compounds of the four litter types studied. Analysis of the lignin structure using cupric oxide oxidation indicates that Metasequoia lignin is enriched in 4'-hydroxyacetophenone and 4'- Hydroxy-3'-methoxyacetophenone relative to the pinaceous litter. In a 12-month decomposition study using litterbags, average litter mass loss was greater for Metasequoia litter (62%) compared to the pinaceous species (50%). Moreover, Metasequoia litter incubated under anoxic conditions produced nearly twice as much CO2 (ca. 4.2 umol/g.day) and CH4 (2.1 umol/g.day) as the pinaceous litter (2.4 umol/g.day for CO2; 1.2 umol/g.day for CH4). Our results support the idea of greater decomposability and palatability of Metasequoia litter as compared to Larix, Picea, or Pinus. Provided that the biochemical properties of Metasequoia have remained relatively stable through geologic time, it appears that early Tertiary Metasequoia-dominated wetland forests may have had higher microbial driven trace gas production than the Pinaceae-dominated forests that replaced them in the late Tertiary.