Abstract
<p>Soil respiration is one of the most significant carbon fluxes in terrestrial ecosystems. The analyses and quantification of soil CO2 production and its influencing factors play a crucial role in the understanding of the global carbon budget.</p><p>To investigate CO<sub>2</sub> efflux from terrestrial soils under field conditions, manual or automated soil chambers are the most common methods. The flux-gradient approach (FGA) as an alternative method applies Fick’s law to vertical profiles of soil CO<sub>2</sub>. The FGA uses the soil gas diffusivity to calculate vertical fluxes of soil CO<sub>2</sub> and the CO<sub>2</sub> efflux from soil. The vertical partitioning the production of CO<sub>2</sub> in different soil layers can be regarded as an option and an advantage of FGA as compared to chamber methods.</p><p>This investigation aims at clarifying whether a spline or an exponential function is more suitable for fitting vertical distributions of measured CO<sub>2</sub> concentrations. We compared simulation results on the CO<sub>2</sub> efflux and the vertical distribution of CO<sub>2</sub> production within the soil when applying an exponential function or a spline function, respectively. Soil CO<sub>2 </sub>concentrations were measured at the soil surface and at 0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 1.0 m soil depth of a Scots pine and a European beech forest stand of the Northeast German Lowlands. Additionally, the CO<sub>2</sub> efflux was estimated by applying the manual chamber method. The results suggest that vertical distribution function of soil CO<sub>2</sub> affects both the calculated CO<sub>2</sub> efflux and the production of soil CO<sub>2</sub>. The CO<sub>2</sub> efflux from the chamber method fits best with the CO<sub>2</sub> efflux from spline function. We discus some effects with the application of the spline function on the calculated vertical distribution of CO<sub>2</sub> production.</p>
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