By Krisy Gashler
Globally, soils contain three times as much carbon as exists in the atmosphere and all plants, combined. Which means that understanding how soil microbes recycle organic materials – sometimes sending CO2 back into the atmosphere, sometimes mineralizing it for long-term storage – may be crucial for the fight against climate change. To that end, new Cornell research has uncovered that soil molecular diversity changes as microbes decompose dead plants, with molecular diversity growing for the first month, then plateauing and dropping thereafter. The insight is reported in a paper published Dec. 10 in Nature Communications.
“This is a hugely important question: can we lose less carbon from soil, or can we even increase our soil carbon stocks, which will help regulate CO2 in the atmosphere?” said Johannes Lehmann, senior author on the paper and Liberty Hyde Bailey Professor of soil and crop sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “Because soils contain so much organic carbon, even small, incremental changes can make a big, big difference in the atmosphere and therefore for climate change.”
First author is Rachelle Davenport, Ph.D. ’24, formerly a graduate student in Lehmann’s lab and now an independent research consultant. In all, 11 co-authors come from seven institutions across six U.S. states and the Netherlands. Their work was supported by four public and private grants, including two from Cornell: a Schmittau-Novak Small Grant through the School of Integrative Plant Science, and a Graduate Research Grant from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.
Source : cornell.edu