Abstract

Coarse woody debris (CWD) is an important pool of carbon in forest ecosystems and is present in all strata as fallen, standing or suspended CWD. However, there are relatively few decomposition studies of CWD in tropical forests compared with temperate forests, and research on suspended CWD in particular has largely not been attempted. Termites are important decomposers in tropical ecosystems yet their role relative to microbial decomposers and the importance of the vertical location of CWD has rarely been considered. For the first time, we examined the relative contribution of macro-invertebrates (predominantly termites) and microbes to the decay of suspended and ground-placed (fallen) CWD in lowland, tropical rainforest. We set up wood baits (Pinus radiata) with and without termite access, and measured wood mass loss after 1 year. Mass loss of ground-placed CWD assays was over four times greater than suspended CWD assays. Termite decomposition was vertically stratified with termites having a large relative contribution to the decomposition of ground-placed CWD and a negligible contribution to the decomposition of suspended CWD. In contrast, the effect of microbes on decomposition was low and not vertically stratified. Although our results support the findings of temperate studies in that decomposition of CWD is dependent on its physical location, we show that in tropical rainforests this is predominantly due to greater termite decomposition on the forest floor. Suspended CWD remains an important carbon sink due to slow microbial decay until it falls to the forest floor where it is more accessible to termites.

Highlights

  • Coarse woody debris (CWD) is an important pool of carbon in forest ecosystems and is present in all strata as fallen, standing or suspended CWD

  • We examined the relative contribution of microbes and termites by assessing differences in mean proportional mass loss using a logit-transformed linear model including decay agent, strata and the interaction between these factors as fixed effects (for example, model ‹ lm(mean proportional mass loss $ decay agent * strata)

  • The decomposition of ground-placed CWD in open mesh bags was significantly greater than decomposition of suspended CWD (Figure 1A), and the interaction between mesh and stratum (F2,119 = 7.152, p < 0.001) significantly influenced proportional mass loss

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Summary

Introduction

Coarse woody debris (CWD) is an important pool of carbon in forest ecosystems and is present in all strata as fallen, standing or suspended CWD. We examined the relative contribution of macro-invertebrates (predominantly termites) and microbes to the decay of suspended and ground-placed (fallen) CWD in lowland, tropical rainforest. Termite decomposition was vertically stratified with termites having a large relative contribution to the decomposition of ground-placed CWD and a negligible contribution to the decomposition of suspended CWD. Our results support the findings of temperate studies in that decomposition of CWD is dependent on its physical location, we show that in tropical rainforests this is predominantly due to greater termite decomposition on the forest floor. Suspended CWD remains an important carbon sink due to slow microbial decay until it falls to the forest floor where it is more accessible to termites

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