Abstract

Methane is an important greenhouse gas. Prediction of its long-term effect on climate changes requires understanding of the sources of its release into the atmosphere. The present work aimed to review the most widely used modern methods for measuring microbial production and emission of methane in soils, and to assess their applicability to various microbial ecosystems. A classification of methods for measuring methane production in microbial soil ecosystems is proposed, based on the basic physical and mathematical approaches to data processing for each method. Under laboratory conditions, methane production is determined by soil samples incubation and layered mass balance methods, which makes it possible to investigate the methanogenic potential of a microbial community for subsequent simulation of microbial processes; these methods, however, cannot be directly extrapolated to natural ecosystems. To determine methane production in field experiments, gradient methods are used, as well as a deep soil chamber technique developed for wetlands. Methods for measuring methane emission are described, as well as their advantages and limitations. While traditional chamber techniques are simple and therefore widely used, their implementation is limited by such factors as changes in environmental conditions caused by using the chamber, small spatial scales, and difficulties in chamber installation in some ecosystems. More recently developed micrometeorological methods are free of these limitations and provide for proper estimations of gas emissions from ecosystems even if these emissions are heterogeneous in space and time. To estimate emissions from such specific objects as landfills and livestock complexes or at large scales (regional or even global), the inverse modeling method is used.

中文翻译：

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测量土壤中甲烷产生和排放的方法学综述

摘要

甲烷是一种重要的温室气体。预测其对气候变化的长期影响，需要了解其释放到大气中的来源。本工作旨在审查最广泛使用的现代方法，以测量土壤中微生物的产生和甲烷排放，并评估其在各种微生物生态系统中的适用性。基于对每种方法进行数据处理的基本物理和数学方法，提出了一种用于测量微生物土壤生态系统中甲烷生成量的方法分类。在实验室条件下，甲烷的产生是通过土壤样品培养和分层质量平衡方法确定的，这使得有可能研究微生物群落的产甲烷潜力，以便随后模拟微生物过程；这些方法，但是，不能直接外推到自然生态系统。为了确定野外实验中的甲烷产量，使用了梯度方法以及为湿地开发的深土室技术。描述了测量甲烷排放的方法，以及它们的优点和局限性。尽管传统的腔室技术简单易行，因此被广泛使用，但其实施受到以下因素的限制：由于使用腔室导致环境条件的变化，空间尺度小以及在某些生态系统中腔室安装困难。较新近开发的微气象方法没有这些限制，并且即使这些排放物在空间和时间上是异质的，也可以对来自生态系统的气体排放物进行适当的估算。