Regional Scale Determinants of Nutrient Content of Soil in a Cold-Temperate Forest

The effect of climatic factors on soil nutrients is significant. Identifying whether soil nutrients respond to local climate and how the forest types modulate this responsiveness is critical for forest management. Therefore, six soil nutrients from five main forest types found for a range of sites within the Daxing’an Mountains, China, were investigated. Climatic factors were obtained from the WorldClim dataset. Pearson correlations and stepwise regressions were employed to elucidate and model the response of the six soil nutrients to the four different climatic factors in this study. On the whole, climate was correlated with all the nutrients. Further, from stepwise regressions, climatic factors could affect soil nutrients in distinct forests. Our findings suggest that climatic factors are instrumental in affecting soil nutrients in different forest types. Identifying the relationships between soil nutrients, climatic factors and forest types, as suggested in this research, can provide theoretical foundations to further comprehend nutrient cycling in the forest ecosystem.