Water extraction times for plant and soil materials used in stable isotope analysis

Abstract

Stable isotopic analysis of water for many ecological applications commonly requires extractions of water from dozens to hundreds of plant and soil samples. With recent advances in mass spectrometry, water extraction, rather than the isotopic analysis itself, is the bottleneck in sample processing. Using cryogenic vacuum distillation, we have created extraction timing curves to determine how much time (T(min)) is required to extract an unfractionated water sample. Our results indicated that T(min) values are 60 to 75 min for stems, 40 min for clay soils, 30 min for sandy soils and 20 to 30 min for leaves. While the extraction times reported here may allow for some reductions relative to times reported in the literature, the extraction process will continue to be a rate-limiting step in plant water analyses. Ultimately, technological advances eliminating the need for extraction are required to greatly increase throughput rates in water isotope analysis for ecological research.