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What lies below? Improving quantification and prediction of soil carbon storage, stability, and susceptibility to disturbance. Active

By John Wesley Powell Center for Analysis and Synthesis August 19, 2015

Soils are a vast reservoir of organic carbon (C), rendering the fate of soil C an important control on the global climate system. Widespread changes in soil C storage capacity present a potentially strong feedback to global change. Yet, a comprehensive understanding of how soil C will respond to climate and/or land use disturbance remains illusive, resulting in major uncertainties in global climate models. Our working group will synthesize information on the processes controlling soil C storage across different spatial scales and develop new procedures to translate local measurements to the regional and global scale datasets used by models.

These activities will improve our ability to map the vulnerability of soil C and constrain the role of soil change on the climate system.

Publications:
Blankinship JC, Berhe AA, Crow SE, Druhan JL, Heckman KA, Keiluweit M, Lawrence CR, Marín-Spiotta E, Plante AF, Rasmussen C, Schädel C. Improving understanding of soil organic matter dynamics by triangulating theories, measurements, and models. Biogeochemistry. 2018 Aug 1;140(1):1-3.

Harden JW, Hugelius G, Ahlström A, Blankinship JC, Bond‐Lamberty B, Lawrence CR, Loisel J, Malhotra A, Jackson RB, Ogle S, Phillips C. Networking our science to characterize the state, vulnerabilities, and management opportunities of soil organic matter. Global change biology. 2018 Feb;24(2):e705-18.

Lawrence, C. R., Beem-Miller, J., Hoyt, A. M., Monroe, G., Sierra, C. A., Stoner, S., Heckman, K., Blankinship, J. C., Crow, S. E., McNicol, G., Trumbore, S., Levine, P. A., Vindušková, O., Todd-Brown, K., Rasmussen, C., Hicks Pries, C. E., Schädel, C., McFarlane, K., Doetterl, S., Hatté, C., He, Y., Treat, C., Harden, J. W., Torn, M. S., Estop-Aragonés, C., Asefaw Berhe, A., Keiluweit, M., Della Rosa Kuhnen, Á., Marin-Spiotta, E., Plante, A. F., Thompson, A., Shi, Z., Schimel, J. P., Vaughn, L. J. S., von Fromm, S. F., and Wagai, R.: An open-source database for the synthesis of soil radiocarbon data: International Soil Radiocarbon Database (ISRaD) version 1.0, Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 12, 61–76, https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-12-61-2020, 2020.

Rasmussen, C., Heckman, K., Wieder, W.R., Keiluweit, M., Lawrence, C.R., Berhe, A.A., Blankinship, J.C., Crow, S.E., Druhan, J.L., Hicks Pries, C.E., Marin-Spiotta, E., Plante, A.E., Schadel, C., Schimel, J.P., Sierra, C.A., Thomson, A., and Wagai, R., (2018), Beyond clay: towards an improved set of variables for predicting soil organic matter content. Biogeochemistry. doi : 10.1007/s10533-018-0424-3\
 

Principal Investigator(s):
Corey R Lawrence (USGS - Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Cente)
Katherine Heckman (U.S. Forest Service)
Marco Keiluweit (UMass)
Susan Crow (University of Hawaii)

Participant(s):
Joseph Blankinship (University of California Santa Barbara)
Joshua P Schimel (University of California Santa Barbara)
Christina Schaedel (Northern Arizona University)
Erika Marin-Spiotta (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Asmeret Berhe (University of California, Merced)
Aaron Thompson (University of Georgia)
Craig Rasmussen (University of Arizona)
Alain Plante (University of Pennsylvania)
Jennifer Druhan (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
William Wieder (National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR))
Carlos Sierra (Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry)
Rota Wagai (Japan National Institute for Agro-Envrionmental Science)

Related Products:
Adding Radiocarbon to the State Factor Matrix by Susan Trumbore, MPI for Biogeochemistry - Prepared for the Goldschmidt conference 2020 - see science base page below for a PDF copy.

Corey Lawrence

Research Geologist
Geosciences and Environmental Change Science Center
Phone
303-236-3210