Seasonal evolution of the Biomass Production Efficiency (BPE) of a French Beech forest

With the evolution of ecosystem management and the actual climate change we are facing, there is a need to improve our knowledge of carbon (C) balance and more specifically of C allocation in the plants. In our study, we quantified the seasonal variation of gross primary production (GPP, obtained through eddy covariance measurements) and biomass production (BP, the C fixed into the biomass obtained thanks to inventory campaign) for a 60-year-old even-aged beech stand located in North East of France. We also assessed the seasonal evolution of the BP efficiency (BPE=BP/GPP; Vicca et al., 2012) and its potential determining factors for our site. For 2014, we found a net ecosystem exchange (NEE) of -549 gC m-2, corresponding to a C sequestration. This value breaks down between 1089 gC m-2 for the respiration of the ecosystem and -1639 gC m-2 for the GPP. On the same year, our stand built up 461.6 gC m-2 of tree biomass (leaves, trunk, branches, fine roots), leading to an annual BPE of 0.28, which is within the range of value found on other similar sites. There was a large temporal variation of C allocation to the different parts of the tree biomass during the growth season. Our results show that the growth first happened in the trunk and branches -with a peak value of 74.5 gC m-2 month-1 in May - whereas the fine roots biomass production started later (end of July) and reached a maximum at the end of the growth season (28.49 gC m-2 month-1 for September). The BPE varied also during the year from 0.13 in April to 0.31 in August, where the BP was the same than in July but the cumulated GPP was already decreasing. The seasonal variation may be mainly explained by climatic variations, whereas the shift between woody above-ground biomass and fine roots biomass could be explained by the phenology (linked to physiological mechanisms)