A new methodical approach to automated monitoring of soil respiration in the field

The relevance of field monitoring of soil respiration is beyond doubt and is determined by the significance of this process in assessing the biological activity of soils and the carbon cycle of terrestrial ecosystems. Due to the dominance of manual measurements, the patterns of daily and seasonal dynamics of soil respiration, especially at night and in the cold season, are poorly understood. The work uses a new approach that allows fully automating field monitoring of soil respiration in order to identify patterns of its multi-scale dynamics in the annual cycle. The know-how of the approach consisted in using soil chambers periodically purged with atmospheric air with built-in low-cost CO2 loggers HT-401/5, recording the dynamics of CO2 concentrations every minute. Purging with atmospheric air brought the chamber concentration of CO2 to the background level, after which the compressor was turned off, and the logger recorded the trend of CO2 accumulation due to soil respiration, used for the standard calculation of the CO2 flux according to the linear model for a closed chamber. The results of continuous automatic monitoring of CO2 fluxes at the stationary site of the Institute of Forest Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Serebryanobor experimental forestry on cultivated sod-podzolic sandy loam soil (loamy sand Cambisol) under blue spruce (Picea pungens, Engelm.) during 2024–2025 with two cold seasons showed the significance of night soil respiration in the daily cycle and respiration in the cold period of the year from November to March in the annual cycle, as well as the role of the temperature factor in multi-scale dynamics of soil respiration, which is of interest for predictive empirical models of this process in a changing climate.

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