Researchers point out how to store more carbon in the soil during climate change

Researchers from Cornell University, Ohio State University, Technical University of Munich and the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station are using synchrotron light to investigate how moisture affects soil carbon – an important ingredient for healthy crops and fertile fields.

“Due to climate change, the Earth will become warmer and moisture events will be more dramatic,” said Itamar Shabtai, an assistant scientist at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station who was a postdoctoral researcher at the U.S. School of Integrative Plant Science. Cornell during this study. “Thus, environments and soils can become drier or more humid, depending on their location.”

Shabtai said that while the effects of temperature extremes are somewhat understood, the impact of moisture on soil organic carbon is still unclear. In a paper published in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Shabtai and his team investigated the impact of humidity and found that microbes in moist soils process organic inputs and store soil organic carbon better than in drier soils.

Understanding how microbes and moisture affect soil carbon can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The team hopes their findings will affect soil management practices, help mitigate the impacts of climate change, and improve predictions about what will happen to carbon in drier soils that cannot be easily managed.

The researchers gained these insights by analyzing their soil samples at the SGM beamline at the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan.

“We were able to understand that there is more carbon with the spectral characteristics of microbes in the wet soils and more carbon that appears to come directly from plant carbon in the drier soils – something that would be almost impossible to do without the synchrotron. technology,” said Shabtai.

More scientific highlights from CLS

The Canadian Light Source (CLS) is a national research facility at the University of Saskatchewan and one of the largest scientific projects in Canadian history. More than 1.000 academic, government and industrial scientists from around the world use CLS every year for innovative research in healthcare, agriculture, the environment and advanced materials.

The Canada Foundation for Innovation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Government of Saskatchewan and the University of Saskatchewan fund CLS operations.

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