Non-linear response of soil carbon gas (CO2, CH4) flux to oxygen availability

Soil oxygen (O2) concentration can impact soil carbon (C) fluxes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4), and is an important chemical gradient across the terrestrial-aquatic interface that drives large differences in ecosystem C storage. Few studies have established quantitative relationships between gas-phase O2 concentration and soil C fluxes in controlled settings. Though standard Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics would predict a highly non-linear relationship between O2 concentration and microbial consumption, existing studies have imposed coarse changes in O2 concentration that necessarily prevent detection of non-linearity. We report on the results of laboratory incubations designed to explore the short-term sensitivity of soil C emissions to a wide range of gas-phase O2 concentrations. Organic-rich soil was collected from a drained peatland and subjected to seven O2 concentration treatments ranging from 0.03 % - 20 % O2. We compared the fit of the observed C flux response to O2 concentration to linear, log-linear, and Michaelis-Menten functions using MSE and residual fits as performance metrics. We found that both CO2 and CH4 emissions were highly sensitive to O2 concentration, with emission rates increasing and decreasing, respectively, at higher O2. Net CH4 emission rates were attenuated at higher O2 concentrations most likely due to stimulation of gross CH4 consumption. A log-linear or Michaelis-Menten model better fit data than a linear model by both performance metrics, demonstrating, empirically, a non-linear relationship between O2 concentration and soil CO2 and CH4 fluxes. Our results suggest high O2 sensitivity of C-rich soils at the terrestrial-aquatic interface and show that the microbial response to soil redox chemistry must be measured over a biophysically meaningful range of conditions to derive relationships that accurately predict soil C fluxes.