Abstract
Commercial chambers for in vivo gas exchange are usually designed to measure on vascular plants, but not on cryptogams and other organisms forming biological soil crusts (BSCs). We have therefore designed two versions of a chamber with different volumes for determining CO2 exchange with a portable photosynthesis system, for three main purposes: (1) to measure in situ CO2 exchange on soils covered by BSCs with minimal physical and microenvironmental disturbance; (2) to acquire CO2-exchange measurements comparable with the most widely employed systems and methodologies; and (3) to monitor CO2 exchange over time. Different configurations were tested in the two versions of the chamber and fluxes were compared to those measured by four reference commercial chambers: three attached to two respirometers, and a conifer chamber attached to a portable photosynthesis system. Most comparisons were done on biologically crusted soil samples. When using devices in a closed system, fluxes were higher and the relationships to the reference chambers were weaker. Nevertheless, high correlations between our chamber operating in open system and measurements of commercial respiration and photosynthetic chambers were found in all cases (R 2 > 0.9), indicating the suitability of the chamber designed for in situ measurements of CO2 gas exchange on BSCs.
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Abbreviations
- BSC(s):
-
biological soil crust(s)
- [CO2]:
-
CO2 concentration
- IRGA:
-
infrared gas analyzer
- RH:
-
relative humidity
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Acknowledgements: The authors are grateful for the assistance provided by Victoria Ochoa, Beatriz Gozalo, Isabel Miralles and Emilio Rodríguez. We also thank AEMET for providing meteorological data. This research was carried out under the PREVEA (CGL2007-63258/BOS), CARBORAD (CGL2011-27493) and Bacarcos (CGL2011-29429) projects, funded by the Spanish National Plan for RD&I and by the European ERDF (European Regional Development Fund), BIOCOM (ERC Grant agreement 242658) funded by the European Research Council under the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013), as well as the COSTRAS (RNM-3614) and GEOCARBO (P08-RNM-3721) projects, both funded by the Junta de Andalucía (Autonomous Regional Government of Andalusia, Spain) and the European Union ERDF. M. Ladrón de Guevara and S. Chamizo received postgraduate fellowships from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, JAE-Pre Grants 2007-029) and the Spanish Government (BES-2007-15218), respectively.
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Ladrón De Guevara, M., Lázaro, R., Quero, J.L. et al. Easy-to-make portable chamber for in situ CO2 exchange measurements on biological soil crusts. Photosynthetica 53, 72–84 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11099-015-0086-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11099-015-0086-5