Rose Abramoff

Ronin Institute

Soil organic carbon (SOC) can be defined by measurable chemical and physical pools, such as mineral-associated carbon, carbon physically entrapped in aggregates, dissolved carbon, and fragments of plant detritus. Yet, most soil models use conceptual rather than measurable SOC pools. What would the traditional pool-based soil model look like if it w...

Developing and testing decadal‐scale predictions of soil response to climate change is difficult because there are few long‐term warming experiments or other direct observations of temperature response. As a result, spatial variation in temperature is often used to characterize the influence of temperature on soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks under...

Quantifying the upper limit of stable soil carbon storage is essential for guiding policies to increase soil carbon storage. One pool of carbon considered particularly stable across climate zones and soil types is formed when dissolved organic carbon sorbs to minerals. We quantified, for the first time, the potential of mineral soils to sorb additi...

Recently, yield shocks due to extreme weather events and their consequences for food security have become a major concern. Although long yield time series are available in Europe, few studies have been conducted to analyze them in order to investigate the impact of adverse climate events on yield shocks under current and future climate conditions....

Microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) affects the fate and storage of carbon in terrestrial ecosystems, but its global importance remains uncertain. Accurately modeling and predicting CUE on a global scale is challenging due to inconsistencies in measurement techniques and the complex interactions of climatic, edaphic, and biological factors across...

As soil microbial respiration is the major component of land CO2 emissions, differences in the functional dependence of respiration on soil moisture among Earth system models (ESMs) contributes significantly to the uncertainties in their projections. Using soil organic C (SOC) stocks and CO2 data from a boreal forest–mire ecotone in Finland and Bay...

Organic matter accumulation in soil is understood as the result of the dynamics between mineral‐associated (more decomposed, microbial derived) organic matter and free particulate (less decomposed, plant derived) organic matter. However, from regional to global scales, patterns and drivers behind main soil organic carbon (SOC) fractions are not wel...

As soil microbial respiration is the major component of land CO2 emissions, differences in the functional dependence of respiration on soil moisture among the Earth system models (ESM) contributes significantly to the uncertainties in their projections. Using soil organic C (SOC) stocks and CO2 data from a boreal forest – mire ecotone in Finland an...

In a recently published paper (1), the authors report that microbial carbon use efficiency (CUE) is the primary determinant of global soil organic carbon (SOC) storage and that the relative impact of plant carbon inputs on SOC is minor. While soil microbes undoubtedly play an important role in soil organic carbon cycling, we are concerned about the...

Current carbon cycle models focus on the effects of climate and land‐use change on primary productivity and microbial‐mineral dependent carbon turnover in the topsoil, while less attention has been paid to vertical soil processes and soil‐dependent response to land‐use change along the profile. In this study, a spatial‐temporal analysis was used to...

Numerical models are crucial to understand and/or predict past and future soil organic carbon dynamics. For those models aiming at prediction, validation is a critical step to gain confidence in projections. With a comprehensive review of~250 models, we assess how models are validated depending on their objectives and features, discuss how validati...

Organic matter accumulation in soil is understood as the result of the dynamics between mineral-associated (often more decomposed, microbial derived) organic matter and free particulate (often less decomposed, plant derived) organic matter. However, at global scales, the patterns and drivers behind main SOC reservoirs are not well understood and re...

Simulations of crop yield due to climate change vary widely between models, locations, species, management strategies, and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs). To understand how climate and adaptation affects yield change, we developed a meta‐model based on 8703 site‐level process‐model simulations of yield with different future adaptation...

The global forest carbon (C) stock is estimated at 662 Gt of which 45% is in soil organic matter. Thus, comprehensive understanding of the effects of forest management practices on forest soil C stock and greenhouse gas (GHG) fluxes is needed for the development of effective forest-based climate change mitigation strategies. To improve this underst...

Soils store vast amounts of carbon (C) on land, and increasing soil organic carbon ( SOC ) stocks in already managed soils such as croplands may be one way to remove C from the atmosphere, thereby limiting subsequent warming. The main objective of this study was to estimate the amount of additional C input needed to annually increase SOC stocks by...

This chapter focuses on the effects of biotic and abiotic factors controlling soil organic carbon dynamics at continental to global scales. On the side of natural effects, it highlights processes that can control carbon inputs, turnover and stabilization in soils. On the side of anthropogenic effects, the chapter focuses on the role of climate chan...

In the age of big data, soil data are more available and richer than ever, but – outside of a few large soil survey resources – they remain largely unusable for informing soil management and understanding Earth system processes beyond the original study. Data science has promised a fully reusable research pipeline where data from past studies are u...

Soil is the largest terrestrial reservoir of organic carbon and is central for climate change mitigation and carbon-climate feedbacks. Chemical and physical associations of soil carbon with minerals play a critical role in carbon storage, but the amount and global capacity for storage in this form remain unquantified. Here, we produce spatially-res...

Soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics emerge from ecological, physical, and biogeochemical interactions between soils and plants. Many models applied in Site‐ to global‐scale studies represent SOM evolution using a cascade of pools that decay in a pseudo‐first‐order manner without explicit account of SOM's dependence on the ecological interactions amo...

Vegetation is a key component in the global carbon cycle as it stores ~450 GtC as biomass, and removes about a third of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. However, in some regions the rate of plant carbon uptake is beginning to slow, largely because of water stress. Here we develop a new observation‐based methodology to diagnose vegetation water stress a...

Advancements in microbially explicit ecosystem models incorporate increasingly accurate representations of microbial physiology and enzyme‐mediated depolymerization of soil organic matter in predicting biogeochemical responses to global change. However, a major challenge with model structural improvements is the requirement for additional parameter...

In the age of big data, soil data are more available than ever, but -outside of a few large soil survey resources- remain largely unusable for informing soil management and understanding Earth system processes outside of the original study. Data science has promised a fully reusable research pipeline where data from past studies are used to context...

Soil carbon (C) models are used to predict C sequestration responses to climate and land use change. Yet, the soil models embedded in Earth system models typically do not represent processes that reflect our current understanding of soil C cycling, such as microbial decomposition, mineral association, and aggregation. Rather, they rely on conceptua...

As a key component of the Earth system, roots play a key role in linking Earth's lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and atmosphere. Here we combine 10 307 field measurements of forest root biomass worldwide with global observations of forest structure, climatic conditions, topography, land management and soil characteristics to derive a spatially...

As a key component of the Earth system, root plays the key role in linking Earth's lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. Here we combine 10307 field measurements of forest root biomass worldwide with global observations of forest structure, climatic conditions, topography, land management and soil characteristics to derive a spatiall...

(150 words limits) Root plays a key role in plant growth and functioning. Here we combine 10307 field measurements of forest root biomass worldwide with global observations of forest structure, climatic conditions, topography, land management and soil characteristics to derive a spatially-explicit global high-resolution (~ 1km) root biomass dataset...

First‐order organic matter decomposition models are used within most Earth System Models (ESMs) to project future global carbon cycling; these models have been criticized for not accurately representing mechanisms of soil organic carbon (SOC) stabilization and SOC response to climate change. New soil biogeochemical models have been developed, but t...

Soils contain more carbon than plants or the atmosphere, and sensitivities of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks to changing climate and plant productivity are a major uncertainty in global carbon cycle projections. Despite a consensus that microbial degradation and mineral stabilization processes control SOC cycling, no systematic synthesis of long-...

Total soil respiration (Rt) is a combination of autotrophic (Ra) and heterotrophic respiration (Rh). Root exclusion methods, such as soil trenching, are often utilized to separate these components. This method involves severing the rooting system surrounding a plot to remove the Ra component. However, soil trenching has potential limitations includ...

The original PDF version of this Article contained an error in Table 1. On the right-hand side of the third row, the third equation was missing a β as an exponent on the first CB. This has now been corrected in the PDF version of the Article. The HTML version was correct from the time of publication.

Climatic, atmospheric, and land-use changes all have the potential to alter soil microbial activity, mediated by changes in plant inputs. Many microbial models of soil organic carbon (SOC) decomposition have been proposed recently to advance prediction of climate and carbon (C) feedbacks. Most of these models, however, exhibit unrealistic oscillato...

Soil decomposition models range from simple empirical functions to those that represent physical, chemical, and biological processes. Here we develop a parsimonious, modular C and N cycle model, the Dual Arrhenius Michaelis Menten – Microbial Carbon and Nitrogen Phyisology (DAMM-MCNiP), that generates testable hypotheses regarding the effect of tem...

Root growth, respiration, and exudation are important components of biogeochemical cycles, yet data on the timing and partitioning of C to these processes are rare. As a result, it is unclear how the seasonal timing, or phenology, of root C allocation is affected by the phenology of its component processes: growth of root tissue, respiration, mycor...

While there is an emerging view that roots and their associated microbes actively alter resource availability and soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition, the ecosystem consequences of such rhizosphere effects have rarely been quantified. Using a meta-analysis, we show that multiple indices of microbially mediated C and nitrogen (N) cycling, includ...

Globally, root production accounts for 33–67% of terrestrial net primary productivity and influences decomposition via root production and turnover, carbon (C) allocation to mycorrhizal fungi and root exudation. As recognized above ground, the timing of phenological events affects terrestrial C balance, yet there is no parallel understanding for be...

Background/Question/Methods Roots are hidden from view and heterogeneously distributed making them difficult to study in situ. As a result, the causes and timing of root production are not well understood. Researchers have long assumed that above and belowground phenology is synchronous; for example, most parameterizations of belowground carbon a...

Background/Question/Methods Annual forest productivity and carbon storage are affected by the amount and timing of carbon allocated belowground. Despite clear relationships between some climate factors (e.g. temperature) and NPP, there are still large gaps in our understanding of the partitioning between above and belowground C allocation. Resear...