The widespread increase of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in northern hemisphere surface waters have been generally attributed to the recovery from acidic deposition and to climatic variations. The long-term responses of DOC to environmental drivers could be better predicted with a better understanding of the mechanisms taking place at the soil level given organic forest soils are the main site of DOC production in forested watersheds. Here, we assess the long-term variation (25 years) of DOC concentration in the solution leaching from the soil organic layer (DOCOL) of a temperate forest. Our results show that DOCOL increased by 32 % (p < 0.001) during the period of study while the lake outlet DOC concentration did not show any changes. Weekly and annual models based on a simple set of explicative variables including throughfall DOC, throughfall precipitation, temperature, litterfall amounts and organic layer leachate calcium concentration (CaOL, taken as a proxy for soil solution ionic strength) explain between 17 and 58 % of the variance in DOCOL depending on model structures and temporal scales. Throughfall DOC and CaOL were both positively related to DOCOL in the models describing its variations at the weekly and annual scale. Temperature was positively correlated to DOCOL, probably due to increased microbial activity, while precipitation had a negative effect on DOCOL (only at the weekly scale), most probably due to a dilution effect. Contrary to our expectations, annual litterfall inputs had no impacts on annual DOCOL variations. Overall, the results shows that DOCOL control is a complex process implicating a set of environmental factors that are acting in different ways while no single variable alone can explain a large part of the variation in both, weekly or annual DOCOL variations.
Keywords: Climate; Dissolved organic carbon; Litterfall; Modeling; Organic soils; Soil leachate; Temperate forest; Throughfall; Watersheds.
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