Root and soil sampling, May 2016
During May, June and July 2016, a big root and soil campaign happened in Manaus, at ZF-2 Experimental station. We spent one week sampling roots through the ingrowth core methodology and one more week sampling soils. After the root sampling, all the roots were cleaned (which meant a lot of time cleaning more than 1,000 samples) and a subsample of roots per plot and layer were scanned for root morphology traits, analysed for phosphatase enzyme activity and another subsample is being kept for mycorrhizae colonisation analyses.
It was a very laborious job to decide on what methodology, both in the field and lab, would better suit our questions, but in the end, after many discussions with AFEX collaborators and many trials in the lab, I'm very happy with the results! Of course, looking forward to analyse all the data we have so far and see how the roots are distributed in such poor soils in the middle of the Amazon!! Do we have substantial differences in root biomass in different seasons (wet and dry)? What is our root turnover and productivity? What about root phosphatase production? Is it high because of the low phosphorus concentration in soils?! Ahhh wait and see (:
Sampling soils was a sweaty task! Thanks to all our field crew that was possible! We'll soon know how variable are soil chemical properties in our plots and check how phosphorus fractions are distributed in this so called poor soil.. As we know, things are never that easy in the tropics, the soil sampling campaign happened during the day, and during the night we transformed our camping base in a small lab, where we were able to extract fresh soils for future analyses of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon, also from the microbial biomass. How cool is that? Back to Manaus, we very quickly also analysed C, N and P enzyme activities from different depths.. Again, thanks to the lab crew that very generously helped us to set the lab at the field station and spent hours sieving soils, preparing tubes and chemical in the middle of the jungle! (More pics of this process will be uploaded soon!)
In the end, after many many discussions and a few moments of stress in a very hot weather I came back to Exeter with loads of data to play with!
Soon more soil pictures and root fun facts!
Lay
