Arid Zone Research ›› 2019, Vol. 36 ›› Issue (2): 296-306.

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Soil Nitrogen Mineralization under Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica Plantation on Sandy Soil

KONG Tao, ZHANG Ying, LEI Ze yong, WANG Dong li, LIU Yang, YU Ji, WU Dan   

  1. College of Environmental Science and Engineering, Liaoning Technical University, Fuxin 123000, Liaoning, China
  • Received:2018-10-12 Revised:2018-10-23 Online:2019-03-15 Published:2019-03-12

Abstract: The availability of soil nitrogen (N) is a key limiting factor for the productivity and stability of sandy forest ecosystems. In this study, the changes of NH4+-N、NO3--N and mineral N contents and the ammoniation, nitrification and nitrogen mineralization rates of soil under the Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantations with 10-60year stand ages were determined. The results showed that the NH4+-N、NO3--N and mineral N contents of soil under the P.sylvestris plantations were increased with the increase of forest stand age in a range of 10-60 years, in which the increase under the plantations with 10-30year stand ages was low, and it was significantly improved under the plantations with 40-60 year stand ages. Soil NH4+-N、NO3--N and mineral N contents were decreased with the increase of soil depth, and they were distributed mainly in 0-20 cm soil layers. The soil ammoniation, nitrification and mineralization rates under the plantations were increased with the increase of forest stand age, and these indexes of the 0-40 cm soil layer was obviously higher than those of 40-100 cm soil layer. The two factor analysis of variance revealed that the effects of forest stand age and soil layer on the mineralization indexes were significant. Soil mineralization indexes had a significant positive correlation with plant height, diameter at breast height, crown width and the contents of soil organic carbon, total nitrogen and alkali nitrogen in the plantations. The redundancy analysis showed that the main environmental factors affecting soil mineralization indexes under the plantations with different stand ages were total nitrogen, total phosphorus and soil organic carbon; the main environmental factors affecting mineralization indexes of different soil layers were alkali hydrolyzable nitrogen, total phosphorus and soil organic carbon. Therefore, the P.sylvestris plantation could be used to improve the soil N in sandy land, the improvement effect of young and middle aged plantations on soil N was small, and that of nearmature forest and mature forest was obvious. The improvement effect of plantation on topsoil was better than that of deep soil. Soil fertility was the main environmental factor affecting soil mineralization index.

Key words: aeolian sandy land, stand age, Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica plantation, ammoniation rate, mineral nitrogen, nitrification rate, N mineralization rate