Professor Wan's team published the latest research results in Functional Ecology on August 6, 2021: Plant functional types regulate non-additive responses of soil respiration to 5-year warming and nitrogen addition in a semi-arid grassland。 This is the second article published in the journal in 2021, following Dr. Juanjuan Han.
Functional Ecology is an international mainstream journal of ecology published by Wiley. The journal publishes about 200 articles per year, and its impact factor in 2021 is 5.608, which belongs to the top journal of SCI Region 1 of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The first author of this research is Dr. Song Jian, a staff member of the Global Change Ecology Laboratory, and the corresponding author is Professor Wan Shiqiang. The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31830012) Key Program, and the experimental platform was set up in the "13 Litan Base of Duolun Restoration Ecology Experimental Station, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences" located in Duolun County, Inner Mongolia.
At present, there is still a lack of understanding of how climate warming and atmospheric nitrogen deposition interact with soil carbon release, which poses great challenges to accurately predict climate change-terrestrial carbon feedback. In this study, the effects of all-day warming and nitrogen addition on soil respiration were explored through a field control experiment with a five-year cycle (2006-2010) cycle, taking the semi-arid grassland of the Mongolian Plateau as the research object, and exploring the underlying mechanism. On average 5 years of experimental data, the results showed that the all-day warming did not affect soil respiration in the grassland, but nitrogen addition reduced soil respiration by 3.7%. Since the third year of the experiment, the inhibitory effect of nitrogen addition on soil respiration may be mainly attributed to the decrease of the biomass ratio of non-grass weeds in plant communities. In addition, continuous warming throughout the day and nitrogen addition have a significant interaction on soil respiration. In the nitrogen-free addition plots, the soil respiration rate was increased by 5.8% throughout the day. In the nitrogen addition plot, the full-day warming reduced soil respiration by 6.3%. At the ambient temperature sample, the addition of nitrogen did not affect the soil respiration of the grassland. In the warming plots, nitrogen addition significantly reduced soil respiration by 9.4%. Changes in soil moisture and the proportion of legume biomass in communities may be the main reasons for the non-additive effect of all-day warming and nitrogen addition on soil respiration. The publication of this result provides empirical evidence for the positive feedback of climate warming and soil carbon under environmental nitrogen conditions. At the same time, the results further emphasize that nitrogen addition leads to warming-positive feedback of soil carbon changes into negative feedback, which reduces soil carbon loss under the warming scenario. If the results of this study are applied to the carbon cycle model, the uncertainty of the model in predicting terrestrial carbon sinks and global carbon cycles under multi-factor global change scenarios can be reduced to a certain extent.
In recent years, Professor Wan's team has successively published in Nature Geoscience, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Ecology Letters, Global Change Biology, Functional Ecology, and New on the response of terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle to climate change and its feedback Phytologist has published more than 150 papers in top international and mainstream journals, and has been cited more than 10,839 times. Professor Wan Shiqiang currently has an H-index of 54 and has been selected as one of the "Highly Cited Scholar in China" in the field of environmental science by the internationally renowned publishing group "Elsevier" for seven consecutive years (2014-2020), which has significantly enhanced the international influence of Chinese ecology. (Global Ecology Laboratory website link: http://gcb.hbu.cn/)
Link to the paper: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13902