Disentangling Sources and Sinks of Carbonyl Sulfide in a Temperate Mountain Grassland

Abstract:

Carbonyl sulfide (COS) is the most abundant sulfur‑containing trace gas present in the troposphere at concentrations of around 500 ppt. Recent interest in COS by the ecosystem-physiological community has been sparked by the fact that COS co-diffuses into plant leaves pretty much the same way as carbon dioxide (CO₂) does, but in contrast to CO₂, COS is not known to be emitted by plants. Thus uptake of COS by vegetation has the potential to be used as a tracer for canopy gross photosynthesis, which cannot be measured directly, however represents a key term in the global carbon cycle.

The use of COS as a tracer for canopy gross photosynthesis relies on the assumption that other sinks or sources of COS within an ecosystem are negligible, so that the COS exchange is through leaves only. Here we use concurrent COS and CO₂ ecosystem-scale eddy covariance and soil chamber flux measurements together with within and above-canopy concentration profiles and an inverse Lagrangian analysis to disentangle sinks and sources of COS in a temperate mountain grassland.

Preliminary results from the vegetation period 2015 suggest the soil at this grassland site to present a source of COS during daytime, which is corroborated by the inverse Lagrangian analysis which infers a COS source in the lowermost part of the canopy, while during nighttime the soil COS exchange is close to zero. At the ecosystem-scale a net uptake of COS was observed throughout the day, which in turn suggests (i) a sink for COS in the plant canopy during nighttime and (ii) a larger (compared to the net flux) gross uptake of COS by the plant canopy during daytime.

Taken together our results suggest that using COS as a tracer for canopy gross photosynthesis may be less straight forward than previously thought and that further work is required to better understand the ecosystem-scale COS exchange and its drivers.