Journal
BIOGEOCHEMISTRY
Volume 118, Issue 1-3, Pages 195-204Publisher
SPRINGER
DOI: 10.1007/s10533-013-9918-1
Keywords
Co-limitation; Fertilization; Nitrogen; Northern hardwood forest; Nutrient availability; Phosphorus
Funding
- NSF
- National Science Foundation
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Environmental Biology [1114804] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0949324, 0949317] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Plant and microbial processes exert control on the stoichiometry of available nutrients, potentially influencing forest ecosystem responses to nitrogen enrichment and other perturbations that alter resource availability. We tested whether an excess of one nutrient influenced the available pool of another, to learn the net outcome of various feedbacks on mineralization and uptake processes. We examined nitrogen and phosphorus availability (assayed with buried ion-exchange resin strips) in the first year of fertilizing northern hardwood forests with 30 kg/ha N, 10 kg/ha P, or N and P together. Fertilizing with a single nutrient raised the availability of the added nutrient and had no detectable effect on availability of the other nutrient. However, resin-available N was raised substantially more by adding N+P than it was by adding N alone. This effect of N+P must be the result of either reduced biotic uptake of N or increased mineralization of N, and suggests that N loss following forest disturbances will be enhanced in cases where the availability of both N and P are increased. That P interacts with N to enhance N availability, by whatever mechanism, could help explain observations of N and P co-limitation in ecosystems and calls attention to the need to carefully elucidate mechanisms underlying co-limitation of forest productivity.
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