Effects of increased CO and N on CH efflux from a boreal mire: a growth chamber experiment.

Increases in the supply of atmospheric CO and N are expected to alter the carbon cycle, including CH emissions, in boreal peatlands. These effects were studied in a glasshouse experiment with peat monoliths cored from an oligotrophic pine fen. The cores with living plants were kept in 720 ppm and 360 ppm CO atmospheres for about 6 months under imitated natural temperature cycle. Fertilisation with NHNO (3 g m for 25 weeks) was applied to 18 of the 36 monoliths. The rate of CH flux was non-linearly dependent on the number of Eriophorum vaginatum shoots growing in the monoliths, probably due to the gas transport properties of the aerenchyma. The average CH efflux rate, standardised by the number of shoots, was increased by a maximum of 10-20% in response to the raised CO level. In the raised-NHNO treatment, the increase in CH release was lower. The effect of combined CO+NHNO on CH release was negligible and even lower than in the single treatments. Both potential CH production and oxidation rates at 5, 15 and 25°C were higher near the surface than at the bottom of the core. As expected, the rates clearly depended on the incubation temperature, but the different treatments did not cause any consistent differences in either CH production or oxidation. The determination of potential CH production and oxidation in the laboratory is evidently too crude a method of differentiating substrate-induced differences in CH production and oxidation in vivo. These results indicate that an increase in atmospheric CO or N supply alone, at least in the short term, slightly enhances CH effluxes from boreal peatlands; but together their effect may even be restrictive.