Temporal asynchrony in soil nutrient dynamics and plant production in a semiarid ecosystem

A central goal of ecosystem ecology is to understand how the cycling of nutrients and the growth of organisms are linked. Ecologists have repeatedly observed that nutrient mineralization and plant production are closely coupled in time in many terrestrial ecosystems. Typically, mineralization rates of limiting nutrients, particularly of nitrogen, during the growing season determine nutrient availability while pools of mineral nutrients remain low and relatively constant. Although several previous reports suggest nitrogen mineralization has the potential to vary seasonally and out of phase with plant production, such a phenomenon has been poorly documented. Here we report results from a semiarid savanna ecosystem characterized by distinct temporal asynchrony in rates of soil nitrogen cycling and plant production. Periods of positive plant growth following the onset of rains coincide with periods of low N turnover rates, whereas higher rates occur late in the wet season following plant senescence and throughout dry seasons. Plant uptake from the substantial mineral N pool present early in the growing season is sufficient to explain most of the N allocation to aboveground plant biomass during the growing season, even in the absence of any wet-season mineralization. The mineral N pool is subsequently recharged by late wet- and dry-season mineralization, plus urine inputs at sites with high levels of ungulate activity. These findings suggest fundamental changes in the quality of substrates available to decomposers over a seasonal cycle, with significant implications for the partitioning of limiting nutrients by plant species, the seasonal pattern of nutrient limitations of aboveground production, and the effective use of N fertilizers in semiarid ecosystems.