Abstract

Soils are an important carbonyl sulphide (COS) sink. However, they can also act as sources of COS to the atmosphere. Here we demonstrate that variability in the soil COS sink and source strength is strongly linked to the available soil inorganic nitrogen (N) content across a diverse range of biomes in Europe. We revealed in controlled laboratory experiments that a one-off addition of ammonium nitrate systematically decreased the COS uptake rate whilst simultaneously increasing the COS production rate of soils from boreal and temperate sites in Europe. Furthermore, we found strong links between variations in the two gross COS fluxes, microbial biomass, and nitrate and ammonium contents, providing new insights into the mechanisms involved. Our findings provide evidence for how the soil–atmosphere exchange of COS is likely to vary spatially and temporally, a necessary step for constraining the role of soils and land use in the COS mass budget.

Highlights

  • Carbonyl sulphide (COS) is the most abundant sulphur gas in the atmosphere [1,2]

  • Our results from 27 sampling sites showed that the net COS flux became less negative when soil inorganic N content (i.e., NH4 + and NO3 − ) increased across European soils (Figure 1a and Table S2), in support of our first hypothesis

  • N content simultaneously increased the COS production (Figures 1 and 2), whilst at the same time, it decreased the capacity of soil to hydrolyse COS (Figures 1 and 2)

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Summary

Introduction

Carbonyl sulphide (COS) is the most abundant sulphur gas in the atmosphere [1,2]. Recent interest in the seasonal and spatial variability of atmospheric COS has intensified its use as an atmospheric tracer of global primary productivity [3,4,5,6]. Agricultural soils have been shown to be strong net emitters of COS [19,20,21,22,23], and their behaviour is being described differently from natural soils within global COS budgets [6] These new recent datasets helped explain why some oxic soils have shifted from being COS sinks to COS sources, and how the magnitude of the COS production and uptake varied with soil types [20,21,23], but they emphasised that the uncertainty on the contribution of soils in atmospheric COS budgets had been largely underestimated

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