Process-based soil carbon models can simulate small short-term changes in soil organic carbon (SOC) by reconstructing the response of soil CO2 and CH4 emissions to simultaneously changing environmental factors. However, the models still lack a unifying theory on the effects of soil temperature, moisture, and nutrient status on the boreal landscape. Thus, even a small systematic error in modelled instantaneous soil CO2 emissions and CH4 emissions may increase bias in the predicted long-term SOC stock.
We studied the environmental factors that control CO2 and CH4 emissions in Finland in sites along a continuum of ecosystems (forest-mire ecotone) with increasing moisture and SOC (I and II); soil CO2 emissions and SOC in four forest sites in Finland (III); and SOC sequestration at the national scale using 2020 forest sites from the Swedish national forest soil inventory (IV). The environmental controls of CO2 and CH4 emissions, and SOC were evaluated using non-linear regression and correlation analysis with empirical data and by soil C models (Yasso07, Q and CENTURY).
In the upland forest-mire ecotone, the instantaneous variation in soil CO2 emissions was mainly explained by soil temperature (rather than soil moisture), but the SOC stocks were correlated with long-term moisture. During extreme weather events, such as prolonged summer drought, soil CO2 emissions from the upland mineral soil sites and CH4 emissions from the mire sites were significantly reduced. The transition from upland forest to mire did not act as a hot spot for CO2 and CH4 emissions. The CO2 emissions were comparable between forest/mire types but the CH4 emissions changed from small sinks in forests to relatively large emissions in mires. However, the CH4 emissions in mires did not offset their CO2 sinks. In the Swedish data, upland forest SOC stocks clearly increased with higher moisture and nutrient status. The soil carbon models reconstructed SOC stocks well for mesotrophic soils but failed for soils of higher fertility and wetter soils with a peaty humus type. A comparison of measured and modelled SOC stocks and the seasonal CO2 emissions from the soil showed that the accuracy of the estimates varied greatly depending on the mathematical design of the model’s environmental modifiers of decomposition, and their calibration.
Inaccuracies in the modelling results indicated that soil moisture and nutrients are mathematically underrepresented (as drivers of long-term boreal forest soil C sequestration) in process-based models, resulting in a mismatch for both SOC stocks and seasonal CO2 emissions. Redesigning these controls in the models to more explicitly account for microbial and enzyme dynamics as catalysts of decomposition would improve the reliability of soil carbon models to predict the effects of climate change on soil C.