Tag Archives: Phosphorus

Warming Arctic forests diverge over nutrients

by

Humans continue their unique uncontrolled experiment to see how increased atmospheric carbon dioxide and the resulting warmer temperatures influence biomes worldwide.  One expected outcome of this global experiment is that trees in the extreme north will show improved growth resulting from a more benign physical environment.  As it turns out, some regions of the north do show this trend, while others don’t – this lack of consistent response is known as divergence.  For her graduate work, Sarah Ellison, working with Patrick Sullivan, Sean Cahoon and Rebecca Hewitt, wanted to document divergence in northern Alaska, and to figure out what might be causing it.

SONY DSC

The Wind River, near Arctic Village in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, is the easternmost site in the study. Credit: Patrick Sullivan.

The researchers established four study sites in four watersheds across the Brooks Range in northern Alaska.  They knew from previous studies that white spruce (Picea glauca) in the western Brooks Range have shown increased growth in response to climate warming, whereas those in the central and eastern Brooks Range have not responded. Some researchers hypothesized  that warmer temperatures caused moisture limitation in the eastern Brooks Range, but previous plant physiological studies done by this research team show no evidence of water stress, even in the extreme eastern portion of the range.

EllisonFig1

The four study sites within the Brooks Range from west to east: Agashashok, Kugururok, Dietrich and Wind River.

So what’s causing divergence?

At each study site, the researchers set up climate stations which collected continuous data on air and soil temperature, wind speed and direction, solar radiation, snow depth and precipitation. (Check out the following (you may need to copy and paste into your browser) for an entertaining look at the challenges of doing this research: https://youtu.be/ty6vwio9LvU).

My beautiful picture

A weather station at the Wind River sight. Credit: Sarah Ellison.

They discovered that soil temperatures were consistently warmer in the western part of the range over the course of the season.

EllisonFig2

 

Soil

Temp.

(deg. C)

 

 

Colder soils are often associated with low levels of available nutrients, because bacteria are less active at colder temperatures, and thus less capable of breaking down nutrients into a form that can be taken up by roots.  In 2014, Ellison and her colleagues measured soil nutrient levels at each site and found generally lower levels in the central (Dietrich) and eastern (Wind River) sites.

EllisonFig3

From top: ammonium, nitrate, phosphate and total free primary amine (TFPA – a proxy for amino acids) availability in the soils at the four sites during the 2014 growing season. Error bars are +/- 1 SE.

There were several other important physiological pieces to this puzzle.  Plants in the west grew more quickly than did plants in the east. Rapid growth was associated with greater photosynthetic rates in the western watersheds. The researchers measured needle nutrient concentration and found that it decreased from west to east. Each year, there was a strong correlation between needle nutrient concentration and branch extension (the measure of tree growth), but the correlation with phosphorus was generally stronger than the correlation with nitrogen.

EllisonFig5

Branch extension in relation to needle phosphorus concentration (left graph) and needle nitrogen concentration (right graph) for three years of the study.

Armed with these findings, Ellison and her colleagues decided to experimentally test whether nutrient availability was limiting growth, particularly in the eastern regions of the Brooks Range.  If so, this would support the hypothesis that cold temperatures and the resulting decrease in nutrient availability were primary factors causing divergence across this vast ecosystem. In June, 2015, the researchers fertilized five trees at each site with a mixture of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium fertilizer, and left five similar nearby trees as untreated controls. After one year, branch extension was greatly enhanced at the most eastern site, and only slightly (insignificantly) enhanced at the most western site.

EllisonFig7top

EllisonFig7bottom

Mean annual growth (branch extension) before and after fertilization experiment for fertilized trees (gray circles) and control trees (black circles). Bars are +/- 1 SE.  Fertilization occurred in 2015 (indicated by vertical dotted lines).

For many years, forest ecologists have believed that forests in young glacial soils are nitrogen limited.  This study, and a few other recent studies, thrust phosphorus into prominence as a factor that can limit forest productivity.  Over time, as the climate continues to warm, soils in the eastern Brooks Range will enjoy increased microbial activity, and may no longer suffer as much from nutrient limitation.

LastAgashashok_SEllison

The Agashashok mesic treeline sits on a gentle slope above the Agashashok river. Credit Sarah Ellison.

One surprising finding was that mycorrhizal growth on fine roots was more extensive in central and eastern watersheds.  Abundant mycorrhizae were associated with reduced branch extension, suggesting that these mycorrhizae may be parasitic, rather than mutualistic. The researchers are in the process of expanding their study to an even greater spatial extent of 20 sites distributed across the Brooks Range, which will allow them to further explore how general their findings are across this vast biome.

note: the paper that describes this research is from the journal Ecology. The reference is Ellison, S. B. Z.,  Sullivan, P. F.,  Cahoon, S. M. P., and  Hewitt, R. E..  2019.  Poor nutrition as a potential cause of divergent tree growth near the Arctic treeline in northern Alaska. Ecology100( 12):e02878. 10.1002/ecy.2878. Thanks to the Ecological Society of America for allowing me to use figures from the paper. Copyright © 2019 by the Ecological Society of America. All rights reserved.

Forest canopy fixes nitrogen shortage

by

The two billion hectares of forest canopy remaining on our planet are ideal habitat for nitrogen fixing microorganisms that can convert N2 to ammonia.

StantonCanopy

View of the forest canopy at the research site. Credit: D. Stanton.

The forest canopy tends to be nutrient-poor because there is no access to nutrients that accumulate in the soils on the forest floor, and rainfall can leach away any nutrients that do accumulate in the canopy from atmospheric deposition. So if you are a microbe, and you want to enjoy the view from the canopy, it is to your advantage to be able to fix atmospheric nitrogen so you can build essential molecules such as proteins and ATP.

As I mentioned in a previous post (Nitrogen continues to confound convention) both phosphorus (P) and molybdenum (Mo) are essential nutrients for biological nitrogen fixation.  Daniel Stanton and his colleagues hypothesized that nitrogen fixation in the canopy might be limited by the availability of P and Mo, so they designed a series of experiments to explore the role of these nutrients at the San Lorenzo Canopy Crane in San Lorenzo National Park in the Republic of Panama.  The crane provides about 1 ha of canopy access to non-acrophobic ecologists.

Stantoncrane

The crane at the research site: Credit: D. Stanton.

In one experiment, Stanton and his colleagues filled thin nylon stockings with vermiculite to form 40 cm long cylinders of 4 cm diameter.  Each cylinder was then soaked in either pure water (control), a molybdenum (Mo) compound, a phosphorus (P) compound, or a combination of Mo and P,  thus establishing four treatments. They attached each of these stockings to five different trees and allowed them to reside in the canopy for six months, to be colonized by microorganisms.

Stantonstockings

Nylon stockings treated with nutrients (or untreated controls) and affixed to branches in the canopy. Credit: D. Stanton.

The researchers measured the rate of nitrogen fixation by cutting a 50 cm2 rectangle from the area of densest growth on each stocking, and incubating it (along with the colonizing microorganisms) in a closed bottle that they had inoculated with heavy nitrogen (15N).  They then measured how much 15N the colonizers took up during a 12 hr incubation period.

Stantonfixationlab

Samples incubating for 12 hr to measure the rate of nitrogen fixation. Credit: D. Stanton.

The most common colonizers were nitrogen fixing filamentous cyanobacteria. These cyanobacteria fixed nitrogen at a somewhat (but not statistically significant) higher rate with Mo addition and at a much higher rate with P addition, and even more so with Mo + P addition.

StantonFig1A

Nitrogen fixation rates for each experimental treatment. C = control.  Note that the y-axis is logarithmic, so these differences in fixation rates are substantial.  Non-overlapping lowercase letters above the bars indicate significant differences between the means.

Nitrogen fixation is complex and costly.  Part of the complexity arises because nitrogenase, the enzyme that catalyzes the reaction, cannot tolerate oxygen.  To deal with this problem, cyanobacteria have evolved heterocysts, which are specialized anaerobic cells where nitrogen fixation occurs.  How does nutrient addition influence heterocyst abundance and function?

There are actually two aspects to this story.  One finding is that Mo addition had no effect on heterocyst abundance, while P addition had a pronounced effect.

StantonFig1B

Heterocyst frequency for each experimental treatment.

A second aspect is that Mo addition had a pronounced effect on the efficiency of nitrogen fixation.  For one analysis the researchers compared the nitrogen fixation rate per heterocyst for the phosphorus addition treatments either without or with Mo addition (in other words, they compared the P added treatment to the Mo + P treatment). Nitrogen fixation rates were much higher in the Mo + P treatments.  So while Mo does not increase heterocyst abundance, it does dramatically increase heterocyst fixation efficiency.

StantonFig2B

Quantity of N fixed per heterocyst per day in relation to absence (left bar) or presence (right bar) of Mo.  P was added for both treatments.  Dark horizontal lines are the median values, quartile range is represented by top and bottom of each box, and the whiskers represent the range of values for each treatment.

Phosphorus acts by markedly increasing the overall cyanobacterial growth.  It increases the amount of cyanobacteria that colonizes the canopy and also increases heterocyst density per filament. In contrast molybdenum’s effect is more nuanced as it increases the efficiency of the nitrogen fixation reaction without having any (obvious) effect on cyanobacterial structure.

How do these findings influence our understanding of tropical forests in the western hemisphere?  It turns out that episodes of nutrient addition actually happen in nature, courtesy of vast plumes of nutrient-rich rock-derived dust that periodically blow over the Atlantic Ocean from the Sahara desert in western Africa. Preliminary estimates by Stanton and his colleagues indicate that nutrient enrichment from these dust plumes is sufficient to  profoundly increase the rates of nitrogen fixation in tropical forests.  This may require us to reconsider our understanding of how nitrogen cycles within and between ecosystems.

note: the paper that describes this research is from the journal Ecology. The reference is Stanton, D. E., S. A. Batterman, J. C. Von Fischer, and L. O. Hedin. 2019. Rapid nitrogen fixation by canopy microbiome in tropical forest determined by both phosphorus and molybdenum. Ecology 100(9):e02795. 10.1002/ecy.2795. Thanks to the Ecological Society of America for allowing me to use figures from the paper. Copyright © 2019 by the Ecological Society of America. All rights reserved.

Nitrogen continues to confound convention

by

Ah nitrogen…  It is the most abundant molecule in the air that we breathe (close to 80%), yet plants always seem to be starving for it.  Annually, nitrogen fertilizers are a $75 billion dollar industry. The problem is that the nitrogen gas that we breathe (N2) is very nonreactive, because the two nitrogen atoms are held together by a massively powerful triple bond.  So N2 must be broken down to some other more usable form (such as ammonia) – a process we call nitrogen fixation.  Most nitrogen fixers are microorganisms that live in soils or symbiotically within plants.  Unfortunately, N-fixation is energetically very costly, so even organisms that can fix nitrogen will generally happily use nitrogen compounds from the soil or leaf litter (the layer of fallen leaves above the soil) if they are available, rather than expending enormous energy to fix it for themselves. The general formula for nitrogen fixation (ignoring protons, electrons and energy transfers) is…

DynarskiEquation

A few years ago Scott Morford, Benjamin Houlton and Randy Dahlgren (the first two are co-authors of the present study) stunned the ecological world by identifying a previously unsuspected source of nitrogen – weathering of bedrock such as the mica schist pictured below. This bedrock was formed from seabeds which were rich in organic matter and had a high concentration of nitrogen compounds When the rock breaks down, both carbon and nitrogen compounds leach into the soil. Katherine Dynarski became interested in nitrogen fixation as an undergrad at Villanova University, so it was natural for her to move to the University of California at Davis to begin her graduate work with Morford and Houlton on how nitrogen cycles through ecosystems.

20150905_162823

Nitrogen-rich mica schist bedrock. Credit: Katherine Dynarski.

Dynarski got involved in this specific project essentially by accident. She was helping a fellow graduate student collect rocks at adjacent forests on contrasting bedrock (one high-N mica schist, and one low-N basalt), and figured that while she was out there, she might as well measure some N-fixation rates. In leaf litter and the soil below, most N-fixation is done by free-living soil bacteria. Dynarski expected higher N-fixation rates in the litter collected above the N-poor bedrock, reasoning that the microorganisms would need to fix nitrogen from the air, because there was little present in the litter.  In contrast, she expected to find lower N-fixation rates in litter collected above the N-rich bedrock, reasoning that the micro-organisms could save considerable energy by using existing nitrogen that had leached into the soil and leaf litter layer. She was shocked when she ran the samples and found exactly the opposite of her expectation, which led her to develop a more substantial project looking at the relationship between bedrock and N fixing microbes.

20150626_080249

Katherine Dynarski conducting gas incubations to measure N-fixation rates in the field. Credit: Scott Mitchell.

Working in northern California and Western Oregon, Dynarski and her colleagues identified sites whose bedrock was low in nitrogen (below 500 parts per million N) or high in nitrogen (above 500 ppm N). The researchers used soil and leaf litter samples from 14 paired sites – high N bedrock with nearby low N bedrock. They analyzed soil and leaf litter samples from each plot for concentration of nitrogen, carbon (C), phosphorus (P) and molybdenum (Mo) – the latter two elements have been shown in other systems to limit the rate of N-fixation.  The researchers also collected samples of underlying bedrock and analyzed N and Mo content of these rocks.

Recall that the conventional paradigm is that microorganisms should have lower N-fixation rates in N-rich environments.  There was negligible N-fixation occurring in the soil, but considerable N-fixation in the leaf litter above.  Thus the conventional prediction was that N-fixation rates would be higher in leaf litter above low-N bedrock. As I mentioned previously, Dynarski found the exact opposite to be true in one site; would this unconventional finding be confirmed by the 14 sites explored in this study?

The answer is yes!  Considerably more N-fixation was detected in leaf litter above high N bedrock than in leaf litter above low N bedrock.

DynarskiFig3

Mean leaf litter N-fixation rates and low-N and High_N bedrock sites.  Error bars are one standard deviation. P = 0.014.

You will notice the large error bars above the graph.  As it turns out, N-fixation rates vary dramatically – even on a very small spatial scale, which is why the researchers took multiple samples from each site. Some sample sites (hotspots) have unusually high rates of N-fixation.  These hotspots are also strongly correlated with high carbon concentration, with greater C in the leaf litter associated with much higher rates of N-fixation.

DynarskiFig4

Litter N-fixation rates in relation to % soil carbon at N-fixation hotspots. Hotspots are defined as having fixation rates greater than 1 kg N per hectare per year.

Dynarski and her colleagues also discovered that, in general, leaf litter above high-N bedrock tended to have more C and P than did leaf litter above low-N bedrock.  Given this finding (along with the hotspot finding) we are now ready to explore the question of why microbes are expending more energy to fix nitrogen in regions where more nitrogen is naturally available.

The researchers considered two hypotheses.  First, it takes N to make N.  N-fixation is catalyzed by N-rich enzymes. It may be that leaf litter above low-N bedrock is too N-poor to provide microbes with enough nitrogen make these enzymes. So the additional nitrogen from high-N bedrock is just enough to allow microbes to produce the N-fixation enzymes.

The second hypothesis is that the litter above low-N bedrock is also low in C, P and Mo, all of which are required for N-fixation. Thus the positive effect of these nutrients overwhelms the negative effect of additional nitrogen on the rate of nitrogen fixation.  According to this hypothesis, the conventional paradigm of high nitrogen availability reducing the rate of N-fixation is correct, but other factors may be equally or more important in natural ecosystems.

Fortunately, this conundrum is easily resolved.  Dynarski and her colleagues took some leaf litter samples and added a small amount of nitrogen to them.  These N-additions significantly reduced N-fixation rates at both low and high bedrock N sites.  Thus environmental N does reduce biological N-fixation, but other factors, such as the availability of other essential nutrients, can overwhelm the inhibitory effect of environmental nitrogen in natural ecosystems

20151121_094514

A Douglas fir forest in the Oregon Coast Range, where some of this research was conducted.  Credit: Katherine Dynarski.

The researchers conclude that nitrogen input from bedrock weathering leads to increased C storage and P retention, ultimately enhancing rates of N-fixation. About 75% of Earth’s surface is underlain by rocks with substantial N reservoirs, so we need to continue exploring the effects of weathering bedrock on ecosystem processes and functioning.

note: the paper that describes this research is from the journal Ecology. The reference is Dynarski, K. A., S. L. Morford, S. A. Mitchell, and B. Z. Houlton. 2019. Bedrock nitrogen weathering stimulates biological nitrogen fixation. Ecology 100(8):e02741. 10.1002/ ecy.2741. Thanks to the Ecological Society of America for allowing me to use figures from the paper. Copyright © 2019 by the Ecological Society of America. All rights reserved.