Someone wrote to someone and someone replied : Robin Duchesneau Wrote in reply to Daniel,
" In forest, we often find low quantities of assimilable forms of nitrogen," Q I take it you mean water soluble nitrogen forms (nitrate and ammonia) ? with the high load of organic matter and active decay there is a lot of nitrogen available to the forest system "and slow growth rates." Q do you have figures on this? I dont, but my gut feeling is that a healthy forest system would have a high yield in total biomass produced per year? Cheers Lloyd Charles ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- In forest system you do have a high load of Organic Matter but this OM has a very high Carbon to Nitrogen ratio. That means you have plenty of carbon but actually small amount of nitrogen in relation to that carbon. This is basically what a fungi will like. This environment is highly acidic because fungi thrive better on that sort of environment. OM with a C:N ratio of 80:1 to even 200 or 300:1 can be found on forest environment. Bacteria will have a hard time trying to get that small amount of N out of the woody debris. Bacteria likes a better C:N ratio like you have in agricultural soils. They also grow better in pH close to neutrality. This is why you have more bacteria on agricultural soil than fungi. So it is not a matter of absolute Nitrogen but relative nitrogen. Everything in the soil should be seeing on a relative basis rather than on an absolute basis. This is what Dr Albrecht have taught us. Jose
