Tropical forests are a key ecosystem for terrestrial carbon cycling, being the most productive ecosystems on earth and accounting for 59% of the global carbon pool in forests. Recent evidence indicates that these ecosystems might have a key role not only in the C cycle but also in the global atmospheric balance of the greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O).

In a study recently published on Biogeosciences a team of scientists (among them the CMCC researchers Simona Castaldi, Teresa Bertolini, Tommaso Chiti and Riccardo Valentini from IAFENT Division) tried to quantify the annual budget of N2O emissions in an African tropical rain forest while measuring and monitoring soil NO2 emissions over 19 months in Ghana, National Park of Ankasa.

The abstract of the paper:
Recent atmospheric studies have evidenced the imprint of large N2O sources in tropical/subtropical lands. This source might be attributed to agricultural areas as well as to natural humid ecosystems. The uncertainty related to both sources is very high, due to the scarcity of data and low frequency of sampling in tropical studies, especially for the African continent. The principal objective of this work was to quantify the annual budget of N2O emissions in an African tropical rain forest. Soil N2O emissions were measured over 19 months in Ghana, National Park of Ankasa, in uphill and downhill areas, for a total of 119 days of observation. The calculated annual average emission was 2.33 ± 0.20 kg N-N2O ha−1 yr−1, taking into account the proportion of uphill vs. downhill areas, the latter being characterized by lower N2O emissions. N2O fluxes peaked between June and August and were significantly correlated with soil respiration on a daily and monthly basis. No clear correlation was found in the uphill area between N2O fluxes and soil water content or rain, whereas in the downhill area soil water content concurred with soil respiration in determining N2O flux variability. The N2O source strength calculated in this study is very close to those reported for the other two available studies in African rain forests and to the estimated mean derived from worldwide studies in humid tropical forests (2.81 ± 2.02 kg N-N2O ha−1 yr−1).

Read the integral version of the paper:
Castaldi S., Bertolini T., Valente A., Chiti T., Valentini R.
Nitrous oxide emissions from soil of an African rain forest in Ghana

2013, Biogeosciences, 10, 4179-4187, doi:10.5194/bg-10-4179-2013, 2013.