Fig 1.
Observed water repellency in undecomposed and decomposed leaf litter.
Litter water repellency in leaf litter types either undecomposed (0 days–open bars) and decomposed in litterbags for 180 days (filled bars). Data refer to mean and 95% confidence interval (N = 10 for each treatment combination) of MED, i.e. volume percentage concentration of ethanol in drops adsorbed by litter samples within 5 s. from administration. Plant litter species are ranked by decreasing difference between undecomposed and decomposed materials (significantly highest means within each plant litter species: *, P < 0.05, Tukey's HSD post-hoc test from the GLMM in S2 Table).
Fig 2.
Water repellency of soil amended with litter at different incubation time.
Dynamics of water repellency in a sandy loam soil amended with 24 different litter types (12 plant species at two ages, undecomposed and decomposed in litterbags for 180 days) over an incubation period of 300 days. Data refer to mean and 95% confidence interval (N = 10 replicates for each treatment combination) of MED, i.e. volume percentage concentration of ethanol in drops adsorbed by amended soil samples within 5 s. from administration.
Table 1.
Linear correlation between LWR and litter biochemistry.
Table 2.
Linear correlation between SWR and litter biochemistry at different incubation time.
Fig 3.
Principal component analysis ordination of biochemical parameters in litter samples and soil water repellency.
Principal component analysis (PCA) ordination of biochemical parameters in 24 litter samples (12 plant species, undecomposed and after 180 days of decomposition) tested for production of WR in a sandy soil incubated for different time periods. (A) Loading vectors of litter parameters (13C NMR regions labelled by corresponding C types). Soil WR at different incubation periods (labelled by days of incubation) is also plotted as a supplementary variable following Legendre & Legendre [39]. (B) Factorial scores of litter samples represented according to maximum WR observed in soil during the incubation period, expressed in classes of hydrophobicity following Schnabel et al. [20]. (C) Decomposition trajectories of plant litter between 0 and 180 days, based on factorial scores of litter samples.