Disrupting Sensitive Soils Could Make Climate Change Worse, Stanford Researchers Find

Global warming and land use practices, such as farming, could change the environment for microbes living in the soil and alter the amount of greenhouse gases they release into the atmosphere.

Nearly a third of the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere annually can be traced back to bacteria living in the soil, where they break down plant and animal matter for energy.

Eroded soil
Stanford research shows that climate change and certain farming practices could shift the amount of carbon dioxide that is released from soil.

For most soil microbes, this transformation requires oxygen.  But a new study finds that tiny, scattered populations of bacteria living in soil are oxygen-starved and have an underappreciated effect on the amount of this potent greenhouse gas that is released into the air.

The research, published Friday, Nov. 24 in the journal Nature Communications and led by Stanford’s Scott Fendorf and former postdoc Marco Keiluweit, finds that these oxygen-free pockets of soil are vulnerable to disruption from climate change and some farming practices.  The scientists said this work could help in modeling future carbon emissions by giving better predictions of how much CO2 might be released from the soil.

“Fortunately, the climate modelers are paralleling us,” said Fendorf, who is the Huffington Family Professor in Earth Sciences at Stanford’s School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences.  “They need to appreciate this and they are.”

Carbon protection
Soil contains three times more carbon than the atmosphere.  Some of that carbon remains trapped underground through chemical reactions with minerals.  However, most is in the form of decomposing plant and animal matter, which microorganisms break down to create energy and CO2 – the equivalent of our eating and breathing.

This breakdown process normally requires oxygen, but in the small pockets of soil that lack oxygen, called anaerobic microsites, bacteria have evolved to extract energy from organic matter without oxygen, albeit less efficiently.  These oxygen-starved microbes produce significantly less CO2 and are also unable to break down certain carbon-rich biomolecules such as waxes and lipids.

“Anaerobic microsites play a protective role in that they preserve certain organic compounds that are abundant in soils worldwide, increasing carbon storage and decreasing CO2 emissions from soils,” said Keiluweit, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

But even though scientists have long known about the existence of anaerobic microsites, their prevalence and their overall contribution to the global carbon cycle – the exchanges of carbon between Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and land systems – was not well understood and was not accounted for in ecosystem models that feed into future climate projections.

“The general perception has been that habitats that are completely underwater such as wetlands and swamps are anaerobic, and that unflooded, or upland, soils are mostly aerobic,” Fendorf said.  “What we show in this study is that there’s actually a very significant volume of upland soil that is sitting in anaerobic environments.”

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