Table 1.
Basic geography, vegetation and soil along the four subalpine and alpine forests in the Bipenggou Nature Reserve, Sichuan, China.
Figure 1.
Variations of surface soil temperature (A), mean seasonal soil temperature (columns) and numbers of soil freeze-thaw cycles (FTCs) (dots) (B) during each stage of decomposition at the four study sites (elevations).
Figure 2.
Percentage of biomass remaining of leaf litter (A) and the decomposition rate (k) during each stage of decomposition at the four elevations (B).
Insert figure is the k values of the 2 year of decomposition (means ± SE, n = 5) and different letters denote significant differences at P<0.05.
Table 2.
Results of the two-way ANOVA for the effects of elevation and species treatments and their interactions on the leaf litter decomposition rate (k).
Table 3.
Pearson’s correlation coefficients (r) between elevation and biotic or abiotic factors in decomposing litter.
Table 4.
Pearson’s correlation coefficients (r) between biotic or abiotic factors and decomposition rate (k).
Figure 3.
Concentrations of leaf litter carbon (A), nitrogen (B), phosphorus (C), potassium (D), lignin (E), C:N (F) and lignin:N (G) ratios at different elevations after every sampling date.
Figure 4.
Concentrations of leaf litter microbial biology, activity of sucrase and acid phosphatase at different elevations after every sampling date.
Abbreviations: MBC = microbial biomass carbon (A), MBN = microbial biomass nitrogen (B), MBP = microbial biomass phosphorous (C), bacterial biomass (D), fungal biomass (E) sucrase A = Sucrase activity (F) and ACPA = acid (pH 6.5) phosphatase activity (G).
Figure 5.
Partitioning of deviance in the decomposition rate during each stage calculated with a partial regression method.
In the figure, a and c are the independent components attributed to two groups of biotic factors (litter chemistry and microbe-related factors), respectively; b is the covariance in a component of the two groups; and d is the residual deviance. The group 1 consists of litter chemical variables, whilst the group 2 is the microbe-related factors. See details of these partial regressions in the Material and Methods section.