The age distribution of global soil carbon inferred from radiocarbon measurements

Zheng, Shixue; Allison, Steven D.; He, Yujie; Levine, Paul A.; Hoyt, Alison M.; Beem-Miller, Jeffrey; Zhu, Qing; Wieder, William R.; Trumbore, Susan E.; Randerson, James T.

doi:10.1038/s41561-020-0596-z

Cited by 147 publications

(212 citation statements)

References 52 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

192

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…These results have significant implications for current approaches to modeling the soil C cycle, most of which have traditionally, if not implicitly, conflated measures of OC abundance with mechanisms of OC (de)stabilization. Given the large uncertainties associated with soil C modeling (Shi et al 2020;Todd-Brown et al 2018) and the strong influence of model conceptual structure on projections, disambiguating SOC amounts, (de)stabilization mechanisms and their relationships to soil properties is essential to model improvement. Furthermore, the contrasting relationships of SOC to climate and soil physicochemical properties in grasslands versus forests suggest that model parameterization may have to vary with biome, such that some processes, such as organic C association with carbonates, require organic-inorganic C linkages in models for some soil systems but not others.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Divergent controls on carbon concentration and persistence between forests and grasslands of the conterminous US

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Variation in soil organic C (%OC) concentration has been associated with the concentration of reactive Fe-and Al-oxyhydroxide phases and exchangeable Ca, with the relative importance of these two stabilizing components shifting as soil pH moves from acid to alkaline. However, it is currently unknown if this pattern is similar or different with regard to measures of soil C persistence. We sampled soils from 3 horizons (uppermost A, uppermost B, C or lowest B horizons) across a pH gradient of 11 grass-dominated and 13 deciduous/mixed forest-dominated NEON sites to examine similarities and differences in the drivers of C concentration and persistence. Variation in C concentrations in all soils could be linked to abundances of Fe, Al and Ca, but were not significantly linked to variation in soil C persistence. Though pH was related to variation in D 14 OC, higher persistence was associated with more alkaline pH values. In forested soils, depth explained 75% of the variation in D 14 OC (p \ 0.0001), with no significant additional correlations with extractable metal phases. In grasslands, soil organic C persistence was not associated with exchangeable Ca concentrations, but instead was explained by depth and inorganic C concentrations (R 2 = 0.76, p \ 0.0001), implying stabilization of organic C through association with carbonate

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Divergent controls on carbon concentration and persistence between forests and grasslands of the conterminous US

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Still, fatty-acid and lignin-phenol 14 C ages are on average 43.6- and 16.6-fold greater than the corresponding τ soil . To further probe these relationships, we additionally considered recent spatially resolved estimates of soil 14 C ages ( 34 ). Biomarker 14 C ages display similar positive relationships with catchment-weighted soil 14 C ages integrated from 0 to 100 cm depth, further demonstrating the strong imprint of soil OC aging processes on fluvial biomarker radiocarbon ages ( Fig.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 5 ), and soil mean carbon age (0 to 100 cm, Right , ref. 34 ). Solid and dashed black lines are reduced major-axis regression lines; reported values are the corresponding reduced major-axis regression slopes and r 2 values ( Materials and Methods ).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…5) Anthropogenic land-use fractional area was calculated as the sum of “croplands,” “urban and built-up,” and “cropland/natural vegetation mosaic” pixels (International Geosphere Biosphere Program classification) extracted from the USGS Global Land Cover Characterization raster data set version 2.0 with 30-arc-second resolution [1 km at the equator ( 69 )]. 6) Soil carbon 14 C ages (0 to 30 cm, 30 to 100 cm, and 0 to 100 cm depth integrated) were calculated from the raster data set of Shi et al ( 34 ) with 0.5° resolution.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Climate control on terrestrial biospheric carbon turnover

Eglinton

Galy

Hemingway

et al. 2021

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Terrestrial vegetation and soils hold three times more carbon than the atmosphere. Much debate concerns how anthropogenic activity will perturb these surface reservoirs, potentially exacerbating ongoing changes to the climate system. Uncertainties specifically persist in extrapolating point-source observations to ecosystem-scale budgets and fluxes, which require consideration of vertical and lateral processes on multiple temporal and spatial scales. To explore controls on organic carbon (OC) turnover at the river basin scale, we present radiocarbon (14C) ages on two groups of molecular tracers of plant-derived carbon—leaf-wax lipids and lignin phenols—from a globally distributed suite of rivers. We find significant negative relationships between the 14C age of these biomarkers and mean annual temperature and precipitation. Moreover, riverine biospheric-carbon ages scale proportionally with basin-wide soil carbon turnover times and soil 14C ages, implicating OC cycling within soils as a primary control on exported biomarker ages and revealing a broad distribution of soil OC reactivities. The ubiquitous occurrence of a long-lived soil OC pool suggests soil OC is globally vulnerable to perturbations by future temperature and precipitation increase. Scaling of riverine biospheric-carbon ages with soil OC turnover shows the former can constrain the sensitivity of carbon dynamics to environmental controls on broad spatial scales. Extracting this information from fluvially dominated sedimentary sequences may inform past variations in soil OC turnover in response to anthropogenic and/or climate perturbations. In turn, monitoring riverine OC composition may help detect future climate-change–induced perturbations of soil OC turnover and stocks.

show abstract

“…(2020) pointed to the ratio of the annual PET to the MAP as the best predictor for SOC distribution. The mean age of SOC also relates to global climate ( Shi et al., 2020). At the same time, Hall et al.…”

Section: The Old Tool and The New Challengementioning

confidence: 99%

New uses for old tools: Reviving Holdridge Life Zones in soil carbon persistence research

Jungkunst

Goepel

Horvath

et al. 2021

J. Plant Nutr. Soil Sci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Growing evidence suggests that climate classification facilitates the identification of zones that either agree or disagree with processes explaining soil organic carbon (SOC) persistence. Already forty years ago, Post et al. (1982) posited that the strict temperature and precipitation‐based classification defining the Holdridge Life Zones (HLZ) provides a descriptive tool to guide our understanding of the heterogeneous distribution of global SOC stocks. Here we argue that this classification has the potential for describing SOC persistence by linking top‐down and bottom‐up approaches from different scales, which allows selection of individual regional relevancies necessary to manage and track the fate of our largest terrestrial carbon (C) reservoir.

show abstract

The age distribution of global soil carbon inferred from radiocarbon measurements

Cited by 147 publications

References 52 publications

Divergent controls on carbon concentration and persistence between forests and grasslands of the conterminous US

Divergent controls on carbon concentration and persistence between forests and grasslands of the conterminous US

Climate control on terrestrial biospheric carbon turnover

New uses for old tools: Reviving Holdridge Life Zones in soil carbon persistence research

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About