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Anders Ahlström

Anders Ahlström

Senior lecturer

Anders Ahlström

Emergent temperature sensitivity of soil organic carbon driven by mineral associations

Author

  • Katerina Georgiou
  • Charles D. Koven
  • William R. Wieder
  • Melannie D. Hartman
  • William J. Riley
  • Jennifer Pett-Ridge
  • Nicholas J. Bouskill
  • Rose Z. Abramoff
  • Eric W. Slessarev
  • Anders Ahlström
  • William J. Parton
  • Adam F.A. Pellegrini
  • Derek Pierson
  • Benjamin N. Sulman
  • Qing Zhu
  • Robert B. Jackson
Show all

Summary, in English

Soil organic matter decomposition and its interactions with climate depend on whether the organic matter is associated with soil minerals. However, data limitations have hindered global-scale analyses of mineral-associated and particulate soil organic carbon pools and their benchmarking in Earth system models used to estimate carbon cycle–climate feedbacks. Here we analyse observationally derived global estimates of soil carbon pools to quantify their relative proportions and compute their climatological temperature sensitivities as the decline in carbon with increasing temperature. We find that the climatological temperature sensitivity of particulate carbon is on average 28% higher than that of mineral-associated carbon, and up to 53% higher in cool climates. Moreover, the distribution of carbon between these underlying soil carbon pools drives the emergent climatological temperature sensitivity of bulk soil carbon stocks. However, global models vary widely in their predictions of soil carbon pool distributions. We show that the global proportion of model pools that are conceptually similar to mineral-protected carbon ranges from 16 to 85% across Earth system models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 and offline land models, with implications for bulk soil carbon ages and ecosystem responsiveness. To improve projections of carbon cycle–climate feedbacks, it is imperative to assess underlying soil carbon pools to accurately predict the distribution and vulnerability of soil carbon.

Department/s

  • Dept of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science
  • BECC: Biodiversity and Ecosystem services in a Changing Climate
  • MERGE: ModElling the Regional and Global Earth system
  • LU Profile Area: Nature-based future solutions

Publishing year

2024-03

Language

English

Pages

205-212

Publication/Series

Nature Geoscience

Volume

17

Issue

3

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

Nature Publishing Group

Topic

  • Climate Research

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1752-0894