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Updated: May 20, 2026

Estimating Sediment Denitrification Rates Using Cores and N2O Microsensors
Published on: December 6, 2018
Low δ18O values of nitrate produced from nitrification in temperate forest soils
Yunting Fang1, Keisuke Koba, Akiko Makabe
1Graduate School of Agriculture, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology, Saiwai-cho 3-5-8, Fuchu, Tokyo 183-8509, Japan.
Abstract:
Analyses of δ(18)O of nitrate (NO(3)(-)) have been widely used in partitioning NO(3)(-) sources. However the δ(18)O value of NO(3)(-) produced from nitrification (microbial NO(3)(-)) is commonly estimated using the δ(18)O of environmental water and molecular oxygen in a 2:1 ratio. Here our laboratory incubation of nine temperate forest soils across a 1500 m elevation gradient demonstrates that microbial NO(3)(-) has lower δ(18)O values than the predicted using the 2:1 ratio (by 5.2-9.5‰ at low elevation sites), in contrast to previous reports showing higher δ(18)O values (up to +15‰) than their predicted values. Elevated δ(18)O values of microbial NO(3)(-) were observed at high elevation sites where soil was more acidic, perhaps due to accelerated O-exchange between nitrite, an intermediate product of nitrification, and water. Lower δ(18)O of microbial NO(3)(-) than the predicted and from previous observations suggests that the contribution of anthropogenic N inputs, such as fertilizer and atmospheric deposition, to a given ecosystem and the progress of denitrification in nitrogen removal are greater than we know. More than half of the δ(18)O of stream NO(3)(-) lower than the predicted value along the elevation gradient also indicate the impropriety using the 2:1 ratio for differentiating NO(3)(-) sources.
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