The ground below your feet contains some 2,500 gigatons of carbon, approximately three times the amount of carbon held in our atmosphere and four times more than is stored in every living thing – trees, ants, whales, and humans included – on our planet.
The ground below your feet contains some 2,500 gigatons of carbon, approximately three times the amount of carbon held in our atmosphere and four times more than is stored in every living thing – trees, ants, whales, and humans included – on our planet.
Despite this, the dynamics that drive soil carbon cycles are less understood than the dynamics of other carbon stocks.
Now, researchers from across Virginia Tech, in collaboration with scientists with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, the National Science Foundation’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and other universities, are offering a new perspective on those processes, revealing that moisture is a critical driver in the regulation and sequestration of soil carbon stocks.
“We’re demonstrating, at the molecular level, that there is a big split in how carbon in soil is cycled between humid and arid soil systems,” said Brian Strahm, a professor in the College of Natural Resources and Environment’s Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation and a primary investigator on the grant that funded this research. “This is useful in allowing us to imagine two fundamentally different models of how carbon is concentrated and moves within soil.”
Read more at Virginia Tech
Image: Brian Strahm’s research focuses on carbon and nutrient cycling in forest soils. (Photo by Sam Dean for Virginia Tech)
