Climate Warming Accelerating Carbon Loss in Soil|CBCGDF Climate Change Working Group

 The potential for global warming to stimulate decomposition rates in soils, and thus release large quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, has long been considered to be one of the potentially most important positive feedbacks to climate change. However, the results from more recent studies have suggested that responses within microbial communities could greatly reduce, or even eliminate, the potential for soil carbon losses under global warming.

 

Responses were not found to be equal in all soils, and differed between geographical regions and ecosystem types. Managed agricultural soils stood out, being the only soils in which microbial community responses reduced the effects of a temperature change on rates of carbon dioxide release. On the other hand, the greatest stimulation was observed in the soils with the greatest carbon content and from boreal and arctic ecosystems, which are warming most rapidly. This indicates that the observed responses could increase the vulnerability of some of the world's most important soil carbon stocks to climate change.

 

We were able to understand that there is more carbon that has spectral features of microbes in the moist soils and more carbon that looks like it comes directly from plant carbon in the drier soils—that's something that would have been nearly impossible to do without synchrotron technology.

 

Editor: Maggie

Checked by: Richard     

Contact: v10@cbcgdf.org; +8617319454776

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