Zhou Yong
Department of Wildland Resources, Utah State University, Logan, UT, United States.
Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, UT, United States.
Front Plant Sci. 2023 Mar 7;14:1106531. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1106531. eCollection 2023.
Predicting how belowground carbon storage reflects changes in aboveground vegetation biomass is an unresolved challenge in most ecosystems. This is especially true for fire-prone savannas, where frequent fires shape the fraction of carbon allocated to root traits for post-fire vegetation recovery. Here I review evidence on how root traits may respond to frequent fires and propose to leverage root traits to infer belowground carbon dynamics in fire-prone savannas. Evidently, we still lack an understanding of trade-offs in root acquisitive vs. conservative traits in response to frequent fires, nor have we determined which root traits are functionally important to mediate belowground carbon dynamics in a frequently burned environment. Focusing research efforts along these topics should improve our understanding of savanna carbon cycling under future changes in fire regimes.
预测地下碳储存如何反映地上植被生物量的变化，在大多数生态系统中都是一个尚未解决的挑战。对于易发生火灾的稀树草原来说尤其如此，频繁的火灾塑造了分配给根系性状的碳比例，以促进火灾后植被的恢复。在此，我回顾了关于根系性状如何响应频繁火灾的证据，并建议利用根系性状来推断易发生火灾的稀树草原的地下碳动态。显然，我们仍然缺乏对根系获取性与保守性性状在响应频繁火灾时权衡关系的理解，也尚未确定哪些根系性状对于在频繁火烧环境中介导地下碳动态具有重要功能。围绕这些主题开展研究工作，应能增进我们对未来火灾格局变化下稀树草原碳循环的理解。
