Abstract
Increasing soil carbon and nitrogen storage can help mitigate climate change and sustain soil fertility1,2. A large number of biodiversity-manipulation experiments collectively suggest that high plant diversity increases soil carbon and nitrogen stocks3,4. It remains debated, however, whether such conclusions hold in natural ecosystems5–12. Here we analyse Canada’s National Forest Inventory (NFI) database with the help of structural equation modelling (SEM) to explore the relationship between tree diversity and soil carbon and nitrogen accumulation in natural forests. We find that greater tree diversity is associated with higher soil carbon and nitrogen accumulation, validating inferences from biodiversity-manipulation experiments. Specifically, on a decadal scale, increasing species evenness from its minimum to maximum value increases soil carbon and nitrogen in the organic horizon by 30% and 42%, whereas increasing functional diversity enhances soil carbon and nitrogen in the mineral horizon by 32% and 50%, respectively. Our results highlight that conserving and promoting functionally diverse forests could promote soil carbon and nitrogen storage, enhancing both carbon sink capacity and soil nitrogen fertility.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 94-101 |
Number of pages | 8 |
Journal | Nature |
Volume | 618 |
Issue number | 7963 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Jun 1 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service for sharing data from the National Forest Inventory database and the Discovery Grants programme (grant no. RGPIN-2018-05700 to S.X.C.) of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for supporting this research. H.Y.H.C. acknowledges the support from NSERC (RGPIN-2019–05109 and STPGP428641) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation and Ontario Research Fund (CFI36014). X.C. wishes to thank NSERC and the Government of Canada for a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship and P.B.R. acknowledges support by the U.S. National Science Foundation Biological Integration Institutes grant no. NSF-DBI-2021898.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PubMed: MeSH publication types
- Journal Article