Project Team and Abstract
Project leadership team: Joshua D. Landis, Senior Research Scientist, Dept. Earth Sciences; Carl E. Renshaw, Professor, Dept. Earth Sciences; Caitlin Hicks Pries, Associate Professor, Dept. Biological Sciences; Sophie von Fromme, Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow, Dept. Biological Sciences; Mukul Sharma, Professor, Dept. Earth Sciences
Leveraging natural systems to remove carbon dioxide is a promising tool for greenhouse gas reduction efforts. Soils, in particular, are able to store more than two times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, despite having lost 20% of their carbon storage potential due to degradation from contemporary deforestation, agriculture, and grazing practices. Restoring the carbon-storage potential of soil through targeted management practices could lead to greatly enhanced carbon sequestration — but only when combined with precise and accurate measurement, which has been difficult to date.
This challenge led the team to develop a new approach to measuring the sequestration of new carbon in soil that couples measurements of carbon content with carbon age, i.e., "carbon chronometry," thereby allowing researchers to directly measure the age of soil organic matter and confirm that new carbon is being pulled from the atmosphere, beyond what would have already been stored. The team has already tested and verified this approach in northeastern forested and arctic tundra landscapes. The Institute grant will now enable the team to demonstrate to funding and research communities that it is possible to accurately determine soil carbon sequestration across global biomes.