Global-scale pattern of peatland &amp;lt;i&amp;gt;Sphagnum&amp;lt;/i&amp;gt; growth driven by photosynthetically active radiation and growing season length

J Loisel,A V Gallego-Sala,Z Yu

doi:10.5194/bg-9-2737-2012

Abstract

Abstract. High-latitude peatlands contain about one third of the world's soil organic carbon, most of which is derived from partly decomposed Sphagnum (peat moss) plants. We conducted a meta-analysis based on a global data set of Sphagnum growth measurements collected from published literature to investigate the effects of bioclimatic variables on Sphagnum growth. Analysis of variance and general linear models were used to relate Sphagnum magellanicum and S. fuscum growth rates to photosynthetically active radiation integrated over the growing season (PAR0) and a moisture index. We found that PAR0 was the main predictor of Sphagnum growth for the global data set, and effective moisture was only correlated with moss growth at continental sites. The strong correlation between Sphagnum growth and PAR0 suggests the existence of a global pattern of growth, with slow rates under cool climate and short growing seasons, highlighting the important role of growing season length in explaining peatland biomass production. Large-scale patterns of cloudiness during the growing season might also limit moss growth. Although considerable uncertainty remains over the carbon balance of peatlands under a changing climate, our results suggest that increasing PAR0 as a result of global warming and lengthening growing seasons, without major change in cloudiness, could promote Sphagnum growth. Assuming that production and decomposition have the same sensitivity to temperature, this enhanced growth could lead to greater peat-carbon sequestration, inducing a negative feedback to climate change.

Highlights

Peatlands are wetland ecosystems that are primarily distributed across the boreal and subarctic regions of the world
A measure of photosynthetically active radiation integrated over the growing season, i.e. over days with mean daily temperature above 0 ◦C (PAR0, in mol photons m−2 season−1), was computed for each site based on a gridded long-term mean climatology with a spatial resolution of 0.5◦ for the period 1931–1960 (CLIMATE 2.2; data available at http://www.bridge.bris.ac. uk/projects/PAIN)
We showed that Sphagnum growth is most strongly controlled by photosynthetically active radiation integrated over the growing season (PAR0), which reflects latitudinal and cloudiness gradients

Summary

Introduction

Peatlands are wetland ecosystems that are primarily distributed across the boreal and subarctic regions of the world. Many paleoecological and modeling studies have shown that inter-annual, centennial, and millennial changes in peat-C accumulation rates are mainly controlled by the regional climate (e.g., Mauquoy et al, 2002; Malmer and Wallen, 2004; Frolking et al, 2010), and that warming might promote peat-C sequestration in temperaturesensitive regions by increasing NPP more than decomposition (Frolking et al, 2003; Beilman et al, 2009; Jones and Yu, 2010; Charman et al, 2012; Loisel and Yu, 2012) These results point to a potential increase in the peat-C sink capacity under the ongoing and projected climate warming, which would result in a negative feedback to climate change. This finding remains a matter of considerable debate, because warming is expected to promote peat decomposition via direct enhanced microbial decomposition or indirect drying of the peatland surface

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