Carbon storage, age, and distribution over time and with hurricane disturbance in Bislay Watershed, Luquillo Experimental Forest, Puerto Rico

We examined the cycling of C between soil pools and with depth at the Luquillo Experimental Forest in Puerto Rico in soils over a 30-year period that spanned repeated hurricanes to assess the impact of hurricanes on C storage, distribution and cycling. We measured soil carbon, nitrogen, 13C isotopic signatures, and 14C isotopic signatures in bulk soil and soil physical fractions in 1988 and again in 2018 after 4 severe hurricanes (in 1989, 1998, and two in 2017). Soils were sampled and analyzed in three depth increments: 0-10 cm, 10-35 cm, and 35-90 cm. Bulk soils were density fractionated into free light density (fLF), occluded light density (oLF) and dense (DF) fractions. Soils were collected from the same approximate locations in each sampling year from ridge, valley, and slope topographic positions across Bislay Watershed. We used statistical analyses and a non-linear matrix model of soil C pools and fluxes (“soilR”) and constrained the parameters with soil and litter survey data to assess the impact of multiple severe hurricanes on soil carbon storage, distrubution, and cycling (age and transit time). Raw soil chemistry data is available in “All_Bisley_Data.csv”. Modeled density distributions for soil carbon ages in the bulk soil and density fractions are available in “allrpdfs.csv”. See “README.txt” for additional description of datasets.