Heterotrophic soil respiration—Comparison of different models describing its temperature dependence

Several models are used to describe the temperature dependence of heterotrophic soil respiration. Six such models are examined here in detail against incubation measurements from different sources. These models are compared using common sums of squared residuals, Bayesian model probabilities and Markov chain Monte Carlo (McMC) samplings of model parameter spaces. The McMC samples were calculated to study the probability distributions of model parameters in detail. We show that the temperature dependence can be described best using a Gaussian model. The often-used Q 10 value as well as four other commonly used models either produce poor fittings or parameter distributions too correlated to be considered useful.