Divergent responses of nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide exchange to pulses of nitrogen addition in a desert in Central Asia

Desert ecosystems are nitrogen-limited, and highly responsive to even small inputs of nitrogen. Recently, desert ecosystems have been affected by increasing levels of nitrogen deposition, which may lead to changes in greenhouse gas efflux. However, the effects of nitrogen deposition on these gases in the desert ecosystems remain poorly understood. To study the dynamics in greenhouse gases under increasing nitrogen, six rates of simulated nitrogen deposition, including 0(N0), 0.5(N0.5), 1.0(N1), 3.0(N3), 6.0(N6), 24.0 (N24) g nitrogen m−2 a−1, were applied in soils of the Gurbantunggut Desert in Central Asia. Efflux of nitrous oxide (N2O), methane (CH4), ecosystem respiration and net carbon ecosystem exchange were measured across two growing seasons for two years. The efflux of the four gases changed greatly in different seasons, which can explain more variation than nitrogen treatments except for N2O. Nitrogen input stimulated N2O emission, especially in the high nitrogen treatments, with N2O emission 1.6 (N6) and 2.6 (N24) times greater than control (N0). However, N2O exchange also depended on the seasons, while only minor changes were found in some seasons (late spring 2010 and late summer 2011). Overall, CH4 uptake (average 31.4 μg m−2 h−1) was not significantly affected by the nitrogen addition. At the high nitrogen treatment levels, ecosystem respiration decreased in the late spring and summer of the second year, with similar responses to nitrogen addition in mid-autumn between two years. Net ecosystem carbon exchange also showed gradual responses to nitrogen addition overall, but did not differ significantly across seasons and treatments. Overall, structural equation models showed that the dynamics in N2O were mostly attributed to variations in nitrogen addition, CH4 to soil moisture (or temperature), ecosystem respiration to plant species richness (or density) and net ecosystem carbon exchange to soil moisture (or temperature). Our study indicates that the changes in greenhouse gas emissions caused by nitrogen deposition in short time scale were small in these desert soils.