The history beneath your feet

I think about dirt a lot more than most people. Probably this is the result of my background in ecosystem science, the study of how nutrients and energy flow throughout the biosphere. The soil represents a huge sink for all major nutrients that sustain life on earth, and an important source of nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen that are naturally recycled to the atmosphere.

But it’s not economic, or really even environmental value that makes soil so fascinating to me. It’s history. In the forests of northeastern Puerto Rico where I’m currently conducting research, the historic record deposited in soil is up to 8, 10 or 15 meters thick and stretches back 300,000 years into the past, to a time when the island itself was shooting up out of the Gulf of Mexico due to rising magmatic rock deep beneath the ocean floor.

If you start looking closely at the composition of soil, you will quickly discover a wealth of information recorded within it. Tiny grains of minerals, produced from thousands to millions of years of water dissolving rock, form the physical matrix on which life has developed. As these clean, crystalline minerals slowly rot, they are chemically transformed into new compounds such as clays. Clays and other secondary minerals add stickiness to the soil, allowing decomposing organic materials to adhere. Slowly, a strange collection of organic materials that were once living and the inorganic ingredients that supported their existence begins to accumulate. As this assortment of the dead and rotting grows, so does the living biomass that it sustains. Most of the soil microfauna is involved in feeding off dead (or other living) organic materials and ultimately recycling nutrients that would otherwise be locked away forever. Embracing death is a way of life in the world’s most biologically diverse ecosystem.

But wait- I was talking about history. Yes, living organisms, dead organic materials, clays and minerals are all important components of the soil, but how do we piece together a history (and of what? The geology that the soil formed over? The forest that once stood atop it? The long-dead animals whose traces still linger within it?) from such a complex and dynamic system?

The answer is not entirely clear. But I am convinced that history is sitting in the dirt, rotting away, waiting patiently for someone to find a way to unwrap the stories contained within.

 

Applying equations to forests- carbon storage across environmental gradients in northeastern Puerto Rico

If you’ve ever read about carbon storage or sequestration (and if you’ve read my blog before, there’s a good chance you have), have you ever wondered how scientists come up with the numbers they love to throw around? How do we “know” that there are 684-724 petagrams of carbon to a depth of 30 cm in all the soils across the whole wide world? How could anyone possibly know that?

We don’t. And we can’t. But there are those crazy enough to try, and trying essentially boils down to  sampling, sampling, sampling, then a whole lot of extrapolating. If you imagine a landscape in which there is a continuous but highly variable distribution of carbon, the only way we’re gong to get any sort of meaningful estimate of the total is to dig a lot of holes. The points you see below represent a lot of holes that I actually helped dig! (I’m one of those crazies). I’ve thrown them up over this topographical surface to give you a sense of just how variable carbon can be across space.

Rather than subject you to a discussion of a ecosystem carbon storage, I’d like to share some pretty pictures I’ve been putting together. I’m attempting to create a model for carbon storage across a roughly 10 km area of forest in northeastern Puerto Rico that is underlain by two bedrock types, contains three distinct forests dominated by different tree species, and has broad gradients in temperature and rainfall across the topographically varied landscape.

Bluer regions represent areas of greater carbon storage while yellower regions store less carbon. Essentially I’ve created an image made of a series of pixels -here, the resolution is coarse enough that you can distinguish individual pixels around the edges. For each pixel, a predicted carbon value has been calculated from a very simple equation that takes bedrock, forest type and elevation into account.

Breaking it down by forest type…

 

 

That’s all for now, hopefully I’ll have more and more interesting pictures to show in the future.

A forest on glass beads

Defying all expectations,  a forest has grown on the beach. Just east of Philadelphia is  the New Jersey Pine Barrens- a vast wilderness almost completely ignored outside of a small group of park rangers, volunteer fire fighters and hardy locals whose families have eked out a subsistence living here for generations. And yet is is considered the largest undisturbed wilderness in the northeastern corridor with a incredibly unique ecology and a set of rare endemic species.

The Pine Barrens region spans most of southeastern New Jersey from the Atlantic coast inland across the mid-Atlantic coastal Plain. The coastal plain is essentially a huge wedge of sand that has accumulated over 5 million years of sedimentary deposition from the Applalachian mountains and southerly flowing rivers such as the Hudson. A long history of sedimentary accumulation has created a flat, unvarying topography. 18 feet of height divide the highest point in the Pine Barrens “uplands” region and the lowest point in the “lowlands”, and yet this seemingly homogeneous landscape has produced broad environmental gradients over incredibly short distances.

The reason for these gradients seems to relate to the unique nature of the sandy, nutrient depauperate soil. Sand can act as either a sieve or a water trap depending on its spatial position. At higher elevations,  rain drains freely through the sandy soils, leaching away any nutrients that accumulate and producing highly acid conditions that few plants can survive on. The uplands forests are dominated by drought-resistant, fire-tolerant pitch pine trees with a smattering of oaks. A few scrubby, low-nutrient requiring members of the Ericaceae family, such as huckleberry and highbush blueberry, dominate the understory. At low elevations, rain accumulates and has nowhere to go. The water table is generally high, producing soils that are saturated year-round. In the most saturated places, one finds peat bogs and white cedar swamps more reminiscent of the deep south than the mid-Atlantic. Swamps grade into tall, shady oak-dominated forests dotted with an occasional pine in the drier lowlands.

The stark contrast between uplands and lowlands vegetation is not just a product of  the soil conditions. The uplands and lowlands communities produce feedbacks on the environment that maintain the land in precisely the same condition for generations, such that nothing new can manage to gain a competitive edge.

In the uplands,  pine trees exude organic acids into the soils, maintaining their soils in a state of poor nutrient quality that nothing else can survive on. Every few years pines drop their needles, but not before sucking nearly all the nutrients out and back into the branches, ensuring that few nutrients are added back to the soil. The low nutrient-quality of this leaf litter slows microbial decomposition, causing years of litter to accumulate on the surface. This litter serves as kindle that enhances the spread of forest fires the pine trees require to sprout. These forest fires keep the less fire-resistant oaks at bay.

In the lowlands, wet conditions prevent forest fires from scorching the landscape with regular ferocity seen in the uplands. Oak trees are able to gain a firmer footing here, and once established, produce a shady understory that pine saplings cannot survive in. The oak trees drop their leaves annually, adding more nutrients to the ground and producing a soil richer in organic matter than enhances the development of a herbaceous understory, which helps crowd out pine saplings.

I stood over a pit we had just dug in the ground, staring down into what resembled a layer cake of dark chocolate, vanilla and red velvet. Distinct stratification in the soil profile  generally indicates a long history of mobilization processes. Organic matter leached down through the chocolately topsoil will sometimes produce a white, organic-free layer beneath, known to soil scientists as an E-horizon. Deeper still, weathering products from the underlying bedrock will accumulate in the subsoil and form complexes with the organic matter that has been transported down. The reddish layer I was seeing in the deep soil was the result of iron accumulation and subsequent oxidization by microbes in need of an energy source. In fact, the entire soil profile, from brown to white to red, is very typical of a class of soils known as Spodosols that dominate the New England and Canadian boreal forests, where low temperatures cause decomposition and other soil-forming processes to occur slowly, resulting in a surface buildup of organic matter and eventually the formation of distinct, colorful stratified layers. What, then, was such a soil doing in the Pine Barrens, a much warmer climate than New England, and a region with few soil nutrients and barely any organic matter inputs?

It turns out that the Pine Barrens soils which so closely resemble Spodosols may in fact be a relic from a much earlier time and different climate. At the height of the Last Glacial Maximum approximately 18,000 years ago, a large continental ice sheet known as the Wisconsan Glacier ended a mere 40 miles north of the Pine Barrens.  The New Jersey climate probably resembled those seen in the high Canadian boreal today, and there is little doubt that the soils that formed were some version of Spodosols. It is entirely possible that, given the state of extreme stasis that the Pine Barrens have existed in since the beginning of the Holocene, not much has occurred to alter the soils from their former state.  A forest that grows today on glass beads has thrived because of its ability to maintain stasis. Peeling back the layers of that forest reveals this stasis to be true, but only for a fleeting moment in the geologic record.

Tree girdling reveals that photosynthates drives soil activity late in the growing season

The role of trees in nourishing the soil has long been understood by ecologists, but the extent to which trees control belowground processes remains unclear. This is due in large part to the difficulties associated with measuring root activity and the dynamic interactions between roots, mycorrhizal fungi, and the soil environment.

To develop a better understanding of how photosynthates, the sugars produced by photosynthesis, influence patterns of growth and metabolic activity in the soil, a group of ecologists in Sweden decided to conduct a large scale girdling experiment. Tree girlding involves stripping tree bark all the way to the depth of the tree’s xylem, the long tubes that transport water from the soil to the leaves using negative pressure and the difference in water potential between the soil and the atmosphere. Xylem is located well inside the living tissue of a tree, but most importantly for a girdling experiment, it is located directly inside the phloem. Phloem is the piping that runs down the tree and transports photosynthates produced in the leaves via gravity into the rest of the plant. Thus by stripping a tree down to its xylem, the researchers are removing phloem and cutting off the supply of photosynthates to the roots and the soil. This allows them to study the effect of photosynthate removal on the soil without influencing roots, water transport or any other soil parameters.

In this large-scale experiment conducted in a boreal Scots pine forest in northern Sweden, six 900m² plots were chosen and rouglhy 120 trees per plot were girdled.  In each plot, half of the trees were girdled early in June and half in late August. Early and late girdling were used to detect whether phenological (seasonal) differences affected root photosynthate production.

The results of this experiment were striking. In the early-girdled plots, soil respiration declined by 27% compared to control plots within the first five days of girdling. (Remember, “soil respiration” refers to the amount of CO₂ released by the soil. It is a proxy for total soil metabolic activity, including the respiration of microbes, fungi, nematodes and other small soil invertebrates, and even roots themselves! Thus more respiration = healthier, more metabolically active soil.) By the end of the growing season, roughly 50% less respiration had occurred in the early-girdled plots. The occurrence of ectomychorizal fungi, an essential nutrient-acquiring symbiote for most plants, was also dramatically reduced. The late-girdled plots responded even faster, with respiration declining almost 40% within the first 5 days of girdling. Interestingly, the researchers found less response to girdling toward the edge of the girdled plots, indicating that soil organisms here were acquiring some photosynthates from neighboring, ungirdled trees.

The more rapid declines of soil respiration in the late girdling plots fit with our current understanding of how trees use their photosynthates. Early in the growing season, and especially in conifer forests, trees allocate most new photosynthates towards shoot, bud and needle production. Simultaneously, trees begin tapping their root carbon stores to enhance above ground growth. Later in the growing season more photosynthates are sent belowground to nourish the soil community. By this point root carbon stores are also diminished.  Girdling trees later in the growing season cuts off carbon supply to the soil at precisely the moment when it is being ramped up.

The flux of photosynthates to the roots has a big impact on belowground processes, with a clear seasonal component. In moving forward in our understanding of whole ecosystem carbon balances, understanding that trees are conduit, connecting the earth to the atmosphere and transforming both in the process, will, I believe, be an essential paradigm to adopt.

 

Reference:

Ho¨gberg P, Nordgren A, Buchmann N et al. (2001) Large-scale forest girdling shows that photosynthesis drives soil respiration. Nature, 411, 789–792.

 

 

 

The microbial loop theory: 30 years of cross-Atlantic communication barriers

The more forest ecologists learn about plant nutrients, the more evidence accumulates that plants are not simply passive organisms whose chances of survival are based on environmental factors outside of their control.  In acquiring basic nutrients from the soil, one may well imagine that a plant’s success is dependent on chemical properties of the soil alone. By simple “luck of the draw”, plants that seed in nutrient-rich spots will grow faster and larger than plants seeding in nutrient poor regions.

In several of my previous posts, I’ve addressed this issue one way or another, talking about plant-mychorrizhal associations and root-grafting as strategies that allow less fortunately placed plants to acquire sufficient nutrients to survive. I’d like to now address an entirely different theory concerning plant nutrient acquisition, one which, despite thirty years of European research, remains hotly contested and represents one of the major theoretical divides between European and American soil/plant ecologists.

The microbial-loop theory is a paradigm developed several decades ago and has become a cornerstone of European thinking about how plants interact with other soil organisms. In essence a relatively simple idea, the microbial loop would, if proved, require the reevaluation of a huge body of North American literature about plant nutrient acquisition, which generally argues that that basic nutrient demands and stoichiometric constraints- most notably nitrogen limitation in temperate forests and phosphorous limitation in the tropics, exert a fundamental control over forest productivity.

It is well known that plants exert significant control over the processes that occur in the rhizosphere, a narrow zone of soil and pore space that surrounds their roots. Here, plants dump simple sugars such as glucose in order to nourish an active microbial community. They apparently do so because microbes exhibit a diverse array of metabolic capabilities that plants themselves do not have. Microbial processes release essential nutrients, such as nitrogen, from complex organic matter in a plant-soluble form. This much about plant-microbe symbioses- trading carbon for nitrogen or another plant-limiting nutrient- is agreed upon by American and European scientists.

We start entering hot water when we look more closely at the actual microbial players in this game- who are they and what exactly are they doing? “Microbe” is really a very generic term that can refer to pretty much any organism that is invisible to the unaided eye. Within this umbrella grouping, two slightly more specific classess of organisms seem to be important in the rhizosphere: protozoa and bacteria. Bacteria are the tiny prokaryotic organisms that are largely responsible for decomposition and the release of plant-available nutrients. Protozoa, however, are single celled eukaryotes. They are larger, have more complex cellular organization, and importantly, feed on their smaller bacterial neighbors. Any soil sample that contains bacteria almost certainly contains protozoa as well. The relationship between these two groups of microorganisms represents a classic and well-studied predatory-prey model.

So, given that plants are feeding microbes by dumping sugar into the soil, who is the sugar intended for? The bacteria, or the protozoa? The classic paradigm would argue that the bacteria, as the important nutrient-acquiring organisms, are the intended recipients of plant carbon exudates.

But what does this make the protozoa? Are they just thieves, stealing a farmer’s corn that was intended to feed his cattle? Numerous studies have shown that protozoan populations increase dramatically in the presence of plant carbon exudates because they are using the carbon themselves. A high-energy, readily available food source is just as appealing to protozoa as it is to bacteria.  Why would plants, that have perfected so many survival strategies over evolutionary time, allow this to happen?

The microbial loop theory argues that it is the protozoa that plants are “cultivating”. Why? Protozoa prey on bacteria, and bacteria, remember, are full of the nutrients that plants need. After eating a bacteria filled meal, a protozoa will likely excrete those same nutrients, making them available for plants. The protozoa are a conduit, passing nutrients to plants that would otherwise be locked up in the bacterial community.

There is mounting evidence from various lines of research in support of the microbial loop theory. Experiments have shown that early in development, plant root architecture is dramatically altered in the presence of protozoa. Increased root branching increases surface area, or “real estate” that protozoa can inhabit. “Tracer” studies, using a labeled isotope of a nutrient, are now providing evidence for a flow of soil nutrients from bacteria to protozoa before becoming plant-available. Finally, molecular studies of bacterial communities reveal an increased abundance of less-palatable bacterial species in the presence of protozoa, and an increased frequency of genes involved with bacterial defense. This genetic evidence underscores the importance of protozoan predation in structuring bacterial communities. Soon, perhaps, nano-cameras will be available to visualize what is actually happening in the rhizosphere between plants, bacteria and protozoa.

The importance of understanding this interaction is not trivial.  The means by which plants get their nutrients has ramifications for ecosystem productivity, ecosystem nutrient cycling, and responses to environmental change. Should we progress forward in the field of ecosystem science, a critical reexamination (and open discussion!) of what exactly is going on in the rhizosphere between plants and they critters they cultivate is necessary.

A detailed review of microbial loop theory and a paper that addresses some of the important counter-arguments:

1.    Bonkowski, M. Protozoa and plant growth: the microbial loop in soil revisited. NEW PHYTOLOGIST 162, 617-631 (2004).
2.    Ekelund, F., Saj, S., Vestergard, M., Bertaux, J. & Mikola, J. The “soil microbial loop” is not always needed to explain protozoan stimulation of plants. SOIL BIOLOGY & BIOCHEMISTRY 41, 2336-2342 (2009).

A Glimpse to the Future

During a supernova, the core of a massive star is compressed, causing it to gravitationally collapse into a neutron star. This is a gorgeous rendition of one particular dying star, our sun, in a hypothetical distant future. Tzlil Hadass has painted the planet’s sky depicting a beautiful spectra of color due to bombardment of the atmosphere with particles from the collapse.

"A Glimpse to the Future", by Tzlil Hadass, artist and molecular biologist

Few people see the beauty in science. Fewer still see the deep connectivity of science and art.

Whats up with nitrogen at Hubbard Brook?

Buried deep in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Hubbard Brook experimental forest has provided ecologists with questions and answers for over four decades.  And more questions.

Hubbard Brook was founded on the principle that it was the ideal location for “small watershed” experiments: it is a forest ecosystem whose energetic inputs and outputs could be fully accounted for and directly measured. Ecologists have been able to ask many broad and profound questions at Hubbard Brook, and the forest has told them a story from which many fundamental ecological principles have been distilled. What causes forests to grow? Where do they get their nutrients? What sort of energy enters and leaves an ecosystem? How are human activities impacting forests? Are they resistant to change, and are they resilient in the wake of disturbance?

Before tackling any of these big questions, you may well wonder about my first statement: that the energetic inputs and outputs of the forest can be fully accounted for and measured. How can one possibly measure all the energy that enters and leaves a forest? In the case of Hubbard Brook, there is a deceptively simple answer: it’s all in the streams. Keep a record of what enters and leaves the streams, and you’ll have a good idea of what is entering and leaving the forest as a whole.

Plants need three things to grow: sunlight, nutrients and water. Of the plant essential nutrients, nitrogen is the most important in temperate deciduous forests, but phosphorous, calcium, magnesium and sulfur, among others, are also essential.  In describing where  nutrients and energy come from, ecologists like to talk about autochthonous and allochthonous inputs. Autochthonous inputs come from within the system. Allochthonous inputs come from elsewhere. In the case of nitrogen, an autochthonous source would be a leguminous plant, or a plant that can convert atmospheric nitrogen into a plant useable form through the biochemical process known as nitrogen fixation. An allochthonous input might be a nitrogen fertilizer sprayed on a field.

Hubbard Brook has plentiful rain and sunlight to support a healthy forest. The first unknown that ecologists tackled was nitrogen, and I’ll focus on it from here on out because understanding nitrogen at Hubbard Brook has proved more challenging than anyone ever imagined.

Where are the plants getting their nitrogen? It turns out that for the last 14,000 years (since the retreat of the North American glacier that allowed the northeastern US to re-vegetate), all nitrogen that has entered and fed Hubbard Brook has come from the atmosphere. From the rain. No nitrogen fixing plants, no weatherable rock-derived nutrients. All that plant nourishment has entered the forest silently, dissolved in the summer rains or the winter snow.

It also turns out that all nitrogen eventually leaves  Hubbard Brook by water as well, in a readily soluble form known as nitrate, or NO3-. Streams cut across the forest, forming discrete, independent watersheds over a relatively small space. (A watershed simply refers to a region whose hydrologic inputs and outputs are well defined and accounted for). Streams are an integral part of the Hubbard Brook forest. Much as your bloodstream carries essential nutrients to your tissue and allows your body to flush out toxins, streams transport nutrients to different parts of the forest and flush away excess chemicals that the system doesn’t use. Through long term monitoring of the stream chemistry at Hubbard Brook, including measurements of headwater inputs and lowland outputs, ecologists have developed an accurate record of how much nitrogen enters and leaves the system annually.

In an unpolluted forest, how much nitrogen enters, and how much nitrate leaves, tells ecologists a lot about the forest’s growth and nutrient requirements. At Hubbard Brook, scientists have found an annual cycle of stream nitrate that reflects a strategy the trees have evolved in response to a predictable environment.

When leaves  drop in autumn, nitrate export in streams peaks. Leaves fall both directly into the stream and onto the surrounding soil, where they are decomposed and their nutrients can be leached away. Over time, this process would lead to a dramatic reduction in the nitrogen held in the system, if not for the annual winter replenishment of nitrogen through snowfall. Snow contains nitrogen just like rain does, and as it builds up on the forest floor during the winter, a stockpile is created for the next growing season. Trees have timed their first buds to break in the spring just as this snow is melting and releasing a pulse of nitrogen into the earth. This is essentially how things work at Hubbard Brook, in the absence of human influence.

However, Hubbard Brook, situated just north of the Washington-New York-Boston urban corridor, is by no means isolated from human pollution. Nitrous oxide gases emitted from fossil fuel combustion dissolve in the atmosphere and are rained out across the world, often at great distances from the source. Since at least the 1960’s, excess nitrogen has been entering Hubbard Brook as nitrate through this process. As a negatively charged anion, nitrate often picks up a hydrogen cation, H+, to balance its charge. “Hydrogen cation” is basically a fancy term for acid (remember ocean acidification?) The greater the concentration of hydrogen in solution, the more acid a solution is. Nitrogen pollution, ecologists realized, was doing something very strange to rainwater chemistry at Hubbard Brook. The concept of acid rain was born.

Thus is should not be surprising that another more powerful trend overlies the annual nitrogen cycle at Hubbard Brook. From first measurements in the late 1950’s until 1970, scientists observed a steady, annual rise in stream water nitrogen export. Since 1970, however, nitrate concentrations have been dropping. This has been attributed in large part to the passage of the Clean Air Act and the subsequent reduction in nitrous oxide emissions from automobiles.

Here’s what is causing ecologists to scratch their heads. Nitrogen levels in Hubbard Brook streams have now been dropping steadily for forty years. They are approximately at their 1960 level, and this downward trend shows no indication of leveling off. This reduction is dramatic, unexpected, and not accounted for by the emissions reductions enforced through the Clean Air Act. It is becoming increasingly clear that something else about the ecosystem has fundamentally changed.

What exactly is happening to cause reduced nitrogen outflow from Hubbard Brook forests concerns ecologists for a variety of reasons. The main reason ecologists are concerned is because the forest has stopped growing. In fact, it is now thought that Hubbard Brook may be losing biomass.

Could reduced nitrogen loss reflect increased nutrient limitation in the forest, and a need for trees to hold tightly to the nutrients they have? Could it mean rainfall is no longer supplying the nitrogen the forest needs? Could the soil microbial community no longer be decomposing and transforming nitrogen in the manner that the forest has depended on for thousands of years? Could it possibly reflect some other fundamental hydrologic shift, perhaps induced by climate change?

The most compelling theories in my view are that the phenomenon of “missing nitrate” is climate change driven, or driven by changes in soil chemistry and loss of important soil cations. I’ll explain both of these ideas briefly and leave you to ponder.

Climate change is certainly causing other weird stuff to happen at Hubbard Brook. The forest typically experiences sub-freezing temperatures all winter and builds up a healthy snowpack. Snow insulates the soil and streams alike, preventing them from freezing. This allows frogs, salamanders and some fish to hibernate over winter without freezing. Recently, warmer and more varied winter weather patterns have lead to reduced snow cover, with the consequence that the soil and stream water are now freezing instead. (The number of frozen salamander bodies discovered in the winter of 2006 was apparently unprecendented). Loss of snow cover is also disrupting the annual nitrogen cycle, which could well be leading to a springtime nitrogen limitation for growing trees.

Calcium, which typically takes the form Ca2+ in soils, turns out have a high affinity for nitrate. The two ions balance each other’s charge, and when nitrate leaches out of soil, it often brings a calcium ion along with it. Actually, it often requires the charge-balancing association provided by calcium to leave the soil in the first place. Well, calcium turns out to be another very important plant nutrient, and unfortunately is not as quickly replenished through rain as nitrogen. Declining soil calcium levels will, over time, produce soil that leaches nitrate less readily. Nitrate loss in streams could thus be indicative of a serious calcium deficiency. Incidentally, sugar maple, a common species in New Hampshire forests and a calcium-accumulating tree, is dying out and may be entirely lost these forests within the next several decades.

What’s up with nitrogen at Hubbard Brook? No one really knows yet, but we’d sure like to figure it out.

In trying to paint a picture of the dynamic nature of nitrogen at Hubbard Brook, I’ve left quite a bit of detail out and haven’t discussed some of the fascinating experimental manipulations that have been conducted at the forest. Hopefully I’ve touched on enough of the important ideas that this ramble provides some sense of the many layers of complexity that ecologists must piece through to understand a system or solve a problem.

 

The title and much of the content of this article I’m crediting to Dr. Gene Likens, a senior ecologist at the Hubbard Brook experimental forest who provided fascinating information on the forest during a conversation and a guest lecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

Carbon sequestration in soils: sources, sinks and pitfalls

When we talk about “sequestering” carbon in the soil to mitigate anthropogenic climate change, what are we really saying as scientists, and what is the public getting from it?  And perhaps even more importantly, what implicit assumptions are we as scientists making that may affect the validity of the widely held belief that increased C storage in soils is a good thing, and can offset our CO2 emissions?

In a recent soil carbon series in the European Journal of Soil Science, one review paper attempts to address these issues. “Carbon sequestration” has become a popular idea among policy makers and scientists alike. As anyone who keeps up on ecosystem science literature will know, C sequestration has also become an explicit motivation for numerous studies of soil and ecosystem properties.

Current best estimates claim that worldwide, soils store 684-720 Pg of C within the upper 30 cm, and 1462-1548 Pg to a depth of 1m. (For anyone not familiar with these terms, 1Pg = 1×10ˆ15 gram). The upper 30% of the soil profile to 1m clearly stores a disproportionate amount of C; this ecologists know to be the zone where continuous inputs from roots and organic matter replenish C. To put these numbers in an ecosystem context, the amount of C stored globally in soils to 30cm is twice the amount  of C stored as CO2 in the atmosphere and three times the amount of C stored in above ground vegetation. Clearly, soils represent a huge pool in global C budgets and should be managed with the knowledge that changes may represent a powerful feedback on the global C cycle. This vast storage potential is what has popularized the idea of sequestering even more C in soils and has spurred a myriad of different research approaches, from ecosystem-scale reforestation efforts to molecular studies of C-mineral binding interactions.

Given the amount of hope that has already been invested in this powerful idea, it is important for scientists interested in soil C to keep several caveats in mind when planning and conducting their research, and when communicating that research to a broader audience at a science or policy conference.

Caveat #1) Carbon sequestration does not necessarily mean climate change mitigation.

Increasing the amount of C stored in a particular ecosystem’s soil does not by default decrease the amount of CO2 released to the atmosphere. This is partially an issue of scale. If policy makers choose to set aside a certain amount of pasture land for reforestation (with the assumption that this will increase the net C storage in these systems), it is often the case that new land will have to be cleared somewhere else to compensate for the lost agricultural production.  The clearest way around this problem is to be selective in land use changes: land that is more fertile should be exploited for farming, and land that is less fertile should be reforested to boost C storage. However, an increasing global population poses obvious constraints to this line of reasoning. Ultimately, the fact remains that in the upcoming decades, we will need to boost our agricultural yields to meet global demand, and furthermore, climate change is predicted to decrease the fertility of some of the world’s most productive regions.

Moreover, allowing land to go back to its “natural” state does not necessarily lead to a net accumulation of C. A forest respires far more CO2 per acre than a wheat field. Due to the high water demands of forests relative to crops, it can sometimes be the case that trees dry up otherwise inundated subsurface soils, and in doing so create a soil environment that accelerates the decomposition of C.  One must have a refined understanding of the sources and sinks of CO2 in any particular ecosystem to claim that it will or will not “sequester” C.

Finally, management changes leading to increased C storage may increase or decrease the flux of other greenhouse gases, most notably N2O and methane. Given that these gases have 298 and 25 times the global warming potential of CO2, respectively, they are not a trivial consideration. Forests often hold less nitrogen than pastures (due to the different C:N demands of woody vs. non-woody tissue), and consequently release more N2O through the microbial process known as denitrification.

Caveat #2) The amount of carbon that can be locked up in soil in finite

Our understanding of how C is actually “stabilized” in soil on a molecular scale is still evolving. Scientists are using powerful technologies such as x-ray crystallography to understand in detail the chemical interactions between soil minerals and carbon-rich compounds that cause C to be tightly bound and inaccessible to microbes. As a general rule, the more mineral surface area available for C binding, the more tightly C is bound. In subsurface soils lower levels of C mean higher (mineral surface area: C) ratios and thus tighter binding of the C that is present.

However, mineral stabilization has its limits. Laboratory experiments are finding that as C is added to soils, “steady states” are sequentially reached. Careful manipulation of the  chemical and thermodynamic parameters of a soil may bump that soil from a lower steady state to a higher one, but whether such techniques can be applied on a whole-ecosystem scale remains to be seen.

To repeat, caveat #2 is that the amount of carbon that can be locked up in soil is finite, which leads to caveat #3.
At present, the amount of CO2 we put in the atmosphere does not seem to be.

Powlson et al. 2011. Soil carbon sequestration to mitigate climate change: a critical re-examination to identify the true and the false. European Journal of Soil Science 62: 42-55.

Fossil forams provide surprising insight into ice age oceans

In the North Atlantic, ocean water circulation patterns have far-reaching effects on global climate. Convective mixing is a dominant process due to thermal stratification of the water column. At low latitudes, warm, low-density surface waters float over a mass of much colder, high-density subsurface water. As warm surface water travels north, the temperature difference between surface and subsurface is diminished. Nutrient-depleted surface water cools and sinks, forcing deep water to rise. As deep water rises to the ocean surface, it brings a fresh pulse of nutrients that causes enhanced ocean productivity near the poles.

The formation of North Atlantic deepwater, or NADW, and the continual circulation of warm, subtropical water, play an important role in moderating Arctic climates. In colder intervals of Earth’s history such as the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) 20,000 years ago, diminished thermal stratification reduces open ocean convection. Less surface water is transported poleward, and the water that is does not have the same warming effect on the local atmosphere and land surfaces.

This much about the interaction between North Atlantic circulation and climate is well understood. However, the timing of changes in NADW circulation and corresponding changes in climate remains something of a mystery. Scientists essentially face a chicken and egg problem- do climate changes shut down this oceanic conveyor belt, or does the shutdown of the conveyor belt occur first, by some other means entirely, but cause subsequent feedbacks on climate?

Currently, the climate change-induced NADW breakdown theory is popular and has been used to explain a number of abrupt climate reversals. The most prominent example is the Younger Dryas (YD), a brief cold-snap that occurred some 12 millions years ago following the end of the LGM and the retreat of continental glaciers. Proponents of this theory argue that glacial melting caused huge pulses of low-density freshwater into the north Atlantic, in precisely the region where vertical stratification is weak today and convective mixing occurs.  This influx of low-density water effectively shut down NADW formation, leading to a rapid cold reversal and a brief but dramatic rebound of continental glaciers.

A recent study using carbon isotopes found in fossil foraminifera, or forams, to date ocean water columns suggests otherwise. 14C is a heavy isotope of carbon that is produced in the upper atmosphere due to cosmic ray activity, and enters the surface ocean as a dissolved gas.  It is a popular isotope for radiometric dating, as it decays to 12C over a known period of time. The quantity of 14C remaining in a sample can thus be used to determine the sample’s age. A decreased 14C/12Cratio indicates an older sample. Indeed, numerous studies suggest that 14C depleted water is associated with decreases in convective mixing.

Fossil foraminifera, a popular organism for radiometric dating studies to reconstruct past climates

But how does one find 10,000 year old water to date and study in the first place? Scientists can’t simply put a bucket into the ocean and pull up 20,000 year old water to- they need a fossil or preserved object from the time period of interest. Some planktonic organisms such as forams leave behind a calcareous exoskeleton when they die. If buried quickly, these can be preserved for thousands or millions of years. While many planktonic organisms preferentially take up 12C over 14C, skewing the natural ratio of the two isotopes in their body tissue, forams do not significantly alter the natural 14C abundance. Examining fossil forams buried in ocean sediments thus provides a window into the past, allowing an accurate date to be ascribed to the ocean that the tiny creature existed in.

What are fossil forams from the North Atlantic telling us about ice age oceans? Proponents of the glacial melt water-induced NADW shutdown theory, and fans of “The Day After Tomorrow”, will no doubt be surprised by the finding that deepwater from the YD era actually dates to 600 years prior to the cold reversal. The shutdown of the oceanic conveyor belt prior to global cooling suggests that an unknown mechanism may in fact be driving ocean circulation, and in doing so exerting a powerful control on global climate.

Thornalley et al. 20110. The Deglacial Evolution of North Atlantic Deep Convection. Science 331: 202-205.

Saharan dust fertilizes new world rainforests

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As winds sweep eastward into the Atlantic off the northwest African coast, a remarkable thing happens: plumes of aeolian dust particles are swept off the surface of the Sahara. They will meander along the varied paths of the easterly trade winds, only to settle again in places as remote from each other as they are from the source: North America, the Caribbean, the Amazon Basin, the southern Mediterranean, eastern Europe, and occasionally even the chilly southern shores of Scandinavia.

A major Saharan dust plume event, November 1988

Where does the dust come from? Total Ozone Mapping Spectrometer (TOMS) suggest two major source areas: the Bodélé depression at the southern edge of the Sahara and an area covering eastern Mauritania, Western Mali and southern Algeria.

A little bit of dust blowing around shouldn’t be anything for meteorologists to bother about.  This dust, however, is anything but inconsequential- in the Caribbean alone, an estimated 20 million tones are deposited annually. It is the primary source of several essential trace elements, such as calcium and magnesium, to island rain forests whose soils have been leached through tens of thousands of years of erosion. Saharan dust enters the Amazon basin in bursts accompanying major wet season rains, feeding the soil with nutrients that the forest depends on. In fact, scientists now believe the Amazon to be so dependent on aeolian dust inputs that efforts are underway to model long-term expansions and contractions of the world’s largest rain forest in relation to the size of the Sahara over geologic time.

Dust not only nourishes the forests, it moderates their climates. African mineral dust is now considered the dominant light scattering aerosol throughout the tropical and subtropical Atlantic. The ability of airborne dust particles to scatter light decreases the amount of direct solar radiation hitting earth’s surface around the equator.

The dependence of major ecosystems across the world on Saharan dust underscores the deep connectivity of the biosphere, atmosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere.

The world’s largest rainforest is nourished by mineral dust blown from across the Atlantic

1.Goudie, A. & Middleton, N. Saharan dust storms: nature and consequences. EARTH-SCIENCE REVIEWS 56, 179-204 (2001).

2.    SWAP, R., GARSTANG, M., GRECO, S., TALBOT, R. & KALLBERG, P. SAHARAN DUST IN THE AMAZON BASIN. TELLUS SERIES B-CHEMICAL AND PHYSICAL METEOROLOGY 44, 133-149 (1992).