Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons^™

An Empirical Model Of Amino Acid Transformations In An Alpine Soil, David A. Lipson, Ted K. Raab, Steven K. Schmidt, Russ K. Monson

Ted K. Raab

Amino acids are potentially important nitrogen (N) sources for plants in many ecosystems. However, a quantitative understanding of organic N availability is lacking for most ecosystems. This study estimates seasonal amino acid fluxes in an alpine tundra soil using three independent data sets. In previous work in an alpine dry meadow ecosystem in the Front Range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, we measured signifcant rates of amino acid production from soil peptides during the plant growing season. This suggested that proteolysis of native soil peptides could serve as a measure of amino acid availability to plants. Here we use a …