Warming‐enhanced preferential microbial mineralization of humified boreal forest soil organic matter: Interpretation of soil profiles along a climate transect using laboratory incubations

Abstract

Humified soil organic matter storage in boreal forests is large, and its responses to warming over relatively long timescales is critical for predicting soil feedbacks to climate change. To derive information relevant across decades to centuries from manipulative short‐term experiments, we conducted incubations of soils from two forested sites along the Newfoundland‐Labrador Boreal Ecosystem Latitude Transect in eastern Canada and assessed linkages between incubation data and these sites' profile characteristics. The sites differ in mean annual temperature by 3.4°C, but vegetation and soil types are similar. Organic soils (Oe + Oa) were incubated for 120 days at 15°C and 20°C, with and without a replaced Oi subhorizon possessing a distinct δ13C signature. Laboratory warming induced significantly greater mineralization and leaching of humified SOM relative to replaced Oi, congruent with greater warming‐induced increases in phenol oxidase activity relative to enzymes associated with labile C acquisition (percent increases of 101% versus 50%, respectively). These data suggest that warming can influence microbial communities and their enzymatic dynamics such that relative losses of humified SOM are disproportionately enhanced. This is consistent with stable isotopic, C:N, and radiocarbon profile differences between the two sites, which suggest a greater degree of microbial processing and greater relative losses of older SOC over the preceding decades at the warmer site, given our knowledge of organic inputs in these soils. This study is a first step toward linking the divergent timescales represented by soil profiles and laboratory manipulations, an important goal for biogeochemists assessing climate change impacts on SOM dynamics.