Ecosystem productivity has a stronger influence than soil age on surface soil carbon storage across global biomes
Date
2022-10-07
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Springer Nature
Abstract
Interactions between soil organic matter and minerals largely govern the carbon sequestration capacity of soils. Yet, variations in the proportions of free light (unprotected) and mineral-associated (protected) carbon as soil develops in contrasting ecosystems are poorly constrained. Here, we studied 16 long-term chronosequences from six continents and found that the ecosystem type is more important than soil age (centuries to millennia) in explaining the proportion of unprotected and mineral-associated carbon fractions in surface soils across global biomes. Soil carbon pools in highly productive tropical and temperate forests were dominated by the unprotected carbon fraction and were highly vulnerable to reductions in ecosystem productivity and warming. Conversely, soil carbon in low productivity, drier and colder ecosystems was dominated by mineral-protected carbon, and was less responsive to warming. Our findings emphasize the importance of conserving ecosystem productivity to protect carbon stored in surface soils.
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© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Version of Scholarly Record of this Article is published in Communications Earth & Environment, 2022, available online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00567-7 . Keywords: carbon cycle; environmental chemistry.
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Citation
Plaza, C., García-Palacios, P., Berhe, A.A. et al. Ecosystem productivity has a stronger influence than soil age on surface soil carbon storage across global biomes. Commun Earth Environ 3, 233 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-022-00567-7