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Title: Emergent temperature sensitivity of soil organic carbon driven by mineral associations

Journal Article · · Nature Geoscience
ORCiD logo [1]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [3];  [4]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [5]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [6]; ORCiD logo [7]; ORCiD logo [8];  [4]; ORCiD logo [9]; ORCiD logo [10]; ORCiD logo [11]; ORCiD logo [2]; ORCiD logo [12]
  1. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States)
  2. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  3. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, CO (United States); Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, CO (United States)
  4. Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins, CO (United States)
  5. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Merced, CA (United States)
  6. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Ronin Inst., Montclair, NJ (United States)
  7. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Yale Univ., New Haven, CT (United States)
  8. Lund Univ. (Sweden)
  9. Univ. of Cambridge (United Kingdom)
  10. USDA Forest Service, Boise, ID (United States). Rocky Mountain Research Station
  11. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  12. Stanford Univ., CA (United States)

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.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, CA (United States); Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA); USDOE Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) Program; USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER); National Science Foundation (NSF)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC52-07NA27344; AC02-05CH11231; AC05-00OR22725; 1926413; 2031238
OSTI ID:
2309792
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 2311069; OSTI ID: 2317769
Report Number(s):
LLNL-JRNL-844927; 1068387
Journal Information:
Nature Geoscience, Vol. 17; ISSN 1752-0894
Publisher:
Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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