Electron Accepting Capacities of a wide variety of peat materials from around the Globe similarly explain CO2 and CH4 production

Abstract

In organic soils the availability of electron acceptors determines the ratio of CO 2 to CH 4 formation under anoxic conditions. While typically only inorganic electron acceptors are considered, the importance of electron accepting capacities of organic matter is increasingly acknowledged. Redox properties of organic matter are yet only investigated for a limited set of peat and reference materials. Therefore, we incubated 60 peat samples of 15 sites located in five major peatland regions covering a variety of both bog and fen samples and characterized their capacities to serve as electron acceptor for anaerobic CO 2 production.

Electron Accepting Capacities of a Wide Variety of Peat Materials From Around the Globe Similarly Explain CO2 and CH4 Formation

“…Results of stable isotopic composition of the peats, that is, values of δ 13 C, δ 15 N, and δ 34 S, are provided in the online data set (Guth et al., 2022), while aggregated values are displayed in Table 2 and visualized in Figure 2 Values of δ 13 C ranged from −28.19‰ in a bog (MB, depth I) to −23.6 also measured in a bog (LB, depth III). The median δ 13 C value for bogs was −25.76 ± 0.81 and −26.56 ± 0.80 for fens (including all depth classes).…”

“…By choosing this approach, we aimed to cover peat material from the acrotelm as well as different ages and decomposition states of the catotelm. For simplicity, we will only refer to the depth class I‐IV in the following, for the exact depths at each site, please consult the data set available to this study (Guth et al., 2022). Moreover, the peat materials presented in this study were not chosen to represent the region of origin or any spatial or climatic trend, transect or gradient, as our small sample set would not have an adequate set of samples representative for each region.…”

“…All data used to reproduce this document are available on Zenodo (Guth et al., 2022) under a CC BY 4.0 license. All critical software to reproduce this study is open source (Berthold et al., 2009; Demsar et al., 2013).…”