Soil freeze-thaw causes shift to older respired carbon

One of the impacts of climate change will include changes in the duration and frequency of snow cover and soil frost. Changes to winter climate dynamics could have an effect on soil respiration rates and stability of carbon. A large portion of soil respiration research has focused on the growing season, so this project aimed to examine the effect that soil freeze-thaw has on soil respiration rates and recruitment of substrates of different potential quality and age. Using nests of horizontally-installed soil gas wells at three prairie sites in Saskatchewan, soil air at various depths was collected and analyzed for CO₂ concentration, stable isotopic, and radiocarbon signatures, at 6 regular intervals between August 2011 to August 2012. The radiocarbon results were the most interesting, where after the soil thaw in March 2012, there was a significant deviation from radiocarbon signatures pre-thaw. At all sites, post-thaw signatures reflected the respiration of significantly older carbon before recovering to normal in the summer. As well, the post-thaw radiocarbon signatures were different than in the winter, suggesting that an interplay between microbial and root respiration was not responsible for the anomalies. These trends were observed through depth and at all sites, though to differing degrees. Comparatively, stable isotopic signatures and soil CO₂ concentrations followed typical annual patterns through depth and time, with higher respiration in the summer and with higher concentrations at depth. Presented here are the results from that study and an associated incubation experiment to address possible methodological bias. Overall, this work suggests that snow duration, and freeze-thaw processes, both have the potential to affect substrates being utilized by the microbial community, and that these subtleties may go unrecognized using only concentration and stable isotopic signature.