Plant and Permafrost Types Differentially Influence Carbon Cycling and Soil Priming (North slope of Alaska, 2021-2025)

Permafrost affected landscapes store a tremendous amount of carbon in soil organic matter (SOM). As permafrost thaws it becomes vulnerable to microbial decomposition and can result in increased greenhouse gas emissions. The impact in which plants, permafrost mineralogy, and elevated CO2 (carbon dioxide) conditions will influence the rate of SOM decomposition, or priming, is unknown. To investigate how plant types, permafrost types, and CO2 conditions influenced priming, we conducted a isotope labelling experiment where we grew Betula nana and Eriophorum angustifolium at CO2 concentrations of 400 ppm (parts per million) and 700 ppm using 10 atom% (percent) enriched 13CO2 (13 C Labeled carbon dioxide) gas. In each plant's mesocosm was a respiration collar filled with thawed permafrost of two mineralogical ages where Itkillik II was ~25,000 years old and Unglaciated was ~4,500,000 years old. We found that Betula was strongly associated with plant-derived carbon respiration and Eriophorum with SOM-derived respiration, and that younger, less weather permafrost was more vulnerable to losses through priming. This dataset contains metadata, a script used for processing gas flux data, peroxidase activity, bacterial communities, Fourier Transform Ion Cyclotron Resonance, porewater C (carbon) data, and soil C data. Many of files are here useful to recreate the workflow and figures used to process and analyze the data and the code can be a bit disjointed. If you are not interested in recreating the workflow and analysis then I recommend using the _____ dataset which contains all relevant data and metadata.