Implementation of mycorrhizal mechanisms into soil carbon model improves the prediction of long-term processes of plant litter decomposition

Abstract

Ecosystems have distinct soil carbon dynamics, including litter decomposition, depending on whether they are dominated by plants featuring ectomycorrhizae (EM) or arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM). However, current soil carbon models treat mycorrhizal impacts on the processes of soil carbon transformation as a black box. We re-formulated the soil carbon model Yasso15 and incorporated impacts of mycorrhizal vegetation on topsoil carbon pools of different recalcitrance. We examined alternative conceptualizations of mycorrhizal impacts on transformations of labile and stable carbon and quantitatively assessed the performance of the selected optimal model in terms of the long-term fate of plant litter 10 years following litter input. We found that mycorrhizal impacts on labile carbon pools are distinct from those on recalcitrant pools. Plant litter of the same chemical composition decomposes slower when exposed to EM-dominated ecosystems compared to AM-dominated ones, and across time, EM-dominated ecosystems accumulate more recalcitrant residues of non-decomposed litter. Overall, adding our mycorrhizal module into the Yasso model improved the accuracy of the temporal dynamics of carbon sequestration predictions. Our results suggest that mycorrhizal impacts on litter decomposition are underpinned by distinct decomposition pathways in AM- and EM-dominated ecosystems. A sensitivity analysis of litter decomposition to climate and mycorrhizal factors indicated that ignoring the mycorrhizal impact on decomposition leads to an overestimation of climate impacts on decomposition dynamics Our new model provides a benchmark for quantitative modelling of microbial impacts on soil carbon dynamics. It helps to determine the relative importance of mycorrhizal associations and climate on litter decomposition rate and reduces the uncertainties in estimating soil carbon sequestration.