Use of Stable Carbon Isotope (13C) for Studying Soil Organic Carbon Contribution and Turnover in an Artificial Forest

Global climate change and its adverse effect is common concern issues of human. Soil organic carbon (SOC) is the most active and important part in the soil carbon pool. It changes with the land use types. As an effective way, it has been considered to play an important role in sequestrating more CO, into soil carbon pool to restrain greenhouse effect by converting tillage to forest. To explore SOC change in artificial forest, carbon isotope composite on (C-13) was employed to investigate SOC contribution and turnover in an 8 years old artificial forest in west of Sichuan Basin in our experiment. Our results indicated that the SOC of whole soil body and particle soil fraction is increase with soil depth, and the latter is lower in the same layer. On the other hand, we found that the delta C-13 of SOC was lower in forests than tillage in the same layers, which might be caused by different turnover rate of SOC. Our results suggested that the SOC was losing in the first years of converting tillage to forest.