Nitrous Oxide and Methane Fluxes from Perturbed and Unperturbed Boreal Forest Sites in Northern Ontario

Abstract

Boreal forests cover approximately 11% of the terrestrial surface of the world or 14.7 million km2 in the circumpolar region of the northern hemisphere. Of this total, approximately one third of these forests are found in Canada. This accounts for on the order of 50% of the total land area in Canada. A static chamber technique was used to determine the fluxes of nitrous oxide and methane from four Boreal forest sites near Cochrane, Ontario (49°03′N,80°40′W), during the summer of 1992. The four sites included a lowland forest, a drained lowland forest, a clear‐cut and drained lowland forest, as well as an upland forest. The N2O fluxes ranged from an uptake of 7.7 μg(N2O)/m2/hr from a drainage ditch to an emission of 3.1 μg(N2O)/m2/hr from an unvegetated clear‐cut region. The CH4 fluxes ranged from an uptake of 23 μg(CH4)/m2/hr from an upland forest site, to an emission of 2900 μg(CH4)/m2/hr from a drainage ditch. Drainage ditches which contained a large amount of algae exhibited large CH4 production and large N2O uptake.