Effects of land use and climate on carbon and nitrogen pool partitioning in European mountain grasslands.

European mountain grasslands are increasingly affected by land-use changes and climate, which have been suggested to exert important controls on grassland carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) pools. However, so far there has been no synthetic study on whether and how land-use changes and climate interactively affect the partitioning of these pools amongst the different grassland compartments. We analyzed the partitioning of C and N pools of 36 European mountain grasslands differing in land-use and climate with respect to above- and belowground phytomass, litter and topsoil (top 23 cm).

Maximizing the information obtained from chamber-based greenhouse gas exchange measurements in remote areas.

Measurements of greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes, particularly methane (CH) and nitrous oxide (NO) in mountain ecosystems are scarce due to the complexity and unpredictable behavior of these gases, in addition to the remoteness of these ecosystems. In this context, we measured CO, CH, and NO fluxes in four semi-natural pastures in the Pyrenees to investigate their magnitude and range of variability. Our interest was to study GHG phenomena at the patch-level, therefore we chose to measure the gas-exchange using a combination of a gas analyzer and manual chambers.