Puerto Rico Leaf Litter Leachate

Authors:

Alicia Dixon William H McDowell Adam Wymore Jody Potter Valerie Schoepfer

Owners:

Alicia Dixon

Type:

Resource

Storage:

The size of this resource is 548.1 KB

Created:

Dec 12, 2024 at 4:06 p.m.

Last updated:

Dec 12, 2024 at 4:21 p.m.

Citation:

See how to cite this resource

Content types:

CSV Content

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Abstract

Tropical rainforests in many regions are experiencing an increased frequency of severe hurricanes and droughts due to climate change. These disturbance events alter the quantity and quality of organic matter inputs entering tropical freshwater ecosystems, including leaf litter and dissolved organic matter. We investigated how climatic disturbance events affect leaf litter leachate entering streams to explore watershed carbon cycling across the terrestrial-aquatic interface. This study used dried senesced and freshly abscised leaves from nine different tree species as proxies of drought- and hurricane-induced changes to leaf litter inputs, respectively. These nine species are representative of the dominant riparian vegetation across most of the Luquillo Mountains of Puerto Rico. Leachate analytes, including forms of carbon, nitrogen, and major cations and anions, were used to determine relationships between climatic events, species type, and leaf leachate composition. Disturbance conditions affected leaching dynamics of dissolved organic carbon and nitrogen. Concentrations of dissolved organic matter were higher in leachate from dried senesced leaves than freshly abscised leaves; however, the magnitudes of these differences were highly variable across species, potentially connected to C:N ratios. We also evaluated the leaching of potassium and other nutrients that can influence freshwater biotic communities. Determining the magnitude of altered carbon inputs following major disturbances will further our understanding of the biogeochemical and metabolic response of tropical streams to drought- and hurricane-based disturbances.

Subject Keywords

Coverage

Spatial

Coordinate System/Geographic Projection:

WGS 84 EPSG:4326

Coordinate Units:

Decimal degrees

Place/Area Name:

Quebrada Prieta Watershed, Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico

Longitude

-65.8137°

Latitude

18.3257°

Temporal

Start Date:	01/01/2007
End Date:	12/31/2008

Streets Terrain Satelite

Spatial Extent

Content

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Select a file to see file type metadata.

Additional Metadata

Name	Value
LeafDATA.csv	This csv file is the leaf data cleaned that I used for all of my analyses in R.
LeafDATA_exl	This datasheet is the raw leaf leachate data for days 1, 3, and 7 for all nine species.
comparison_dataset	This datasheet has data for pre-existing values from literature (cited in my paper) to compare to my brown and green leachate data.

How to Cite

Dixon, A., W. H. McDowell, A. Wymore, J. Potter, V. Schoepfer (2024). Puerto Rico Leaf Litter Leachate, HydroShare, http://www.hydroshare.org/resource/8ebb972ad69f4112976714dbdc352ec5

This resource is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY.

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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