The triple isotopic composition of oxygen in leaf water

A. Landais*, E. Barkan, D. Yakir, B. Luz

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

113 Scopus citations

Abstract

The isotopic composition of atmospheric O2 depends on the rates of oxygen cycling in photosynthesis, respiration, photochemical reactions in the stratosphere and on δ17O and δ18O of ocean and leaf water. While most of the factors affecting δ17O and δ18O of air O2 have been studied extensively in recent years, δ17O of leaf water-the substrate for all terrestrial photosynthesis-remained unknown. In order to understand the isotopic composition of atmospheric O2 at present and in fossil air in ice cores, we studied leaf water in field experiments in Israel and in a European survey. We measured the difference in δ17O and δ18O between stem and leaf water, which is the result of isotope enrichment during transpiration. We calculated the slopes of the lines linking the isotopic compositions of stem and leaf water. The obtained slopes in ln(δ17O + 1) vs. ln(δ18O + 1) plots are characterized by very high precision (∼0.001) despite of relatively large differences between duplicates in both δ17O and δ18O (0.02-0.05‰). This is so because the errors in δ18O and δ17O are mass-dependent. The slope of the leaf transpiration process varied between 0.5111 ± 0.0013 and 0.5204 ± 0.0005, which is considerably smaller than the slope linking liquid water and vapor at equilibrium (0.529). We further found that the slope of the transpiration process decreases with atmospheric relative humidity (h) as 0.522-0.008 × h, for h in the range 0.3-1. This slope is neither influenced by the plant species, nor by the environmental conditions where plants grow nor does it show strong variations along long leaves.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)4105-4115
Number of pages11
JournalGeochimica et Cosmochimica Acta
Volume70
Issue number16
DOIs
StatePublished - 15 Aug 2006

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