Abiotic and Biotic Controls on Soil Organo–Mineral Interactions: Developing Model Structures to Analyze Why Soil Organic Matter Persists

Abstract

Soil organic matter (SOM) represents the single largest actively cycling reservoir of terrestrial organic carbon, accounting for more than three times as much carbon as that present in the atmosphere or terrestrial vegetation (Schmidt et al. 2011; Lehmann and Kleber 2015). SOM is vulnerable to decomposition to either CO2 or CH4, which can increase atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations (GHGs) and serve as a positive feedback to climate change. Conversely, the formation and stabilization of SOM within aggregates or associated with soil minerals can lead to carbon sequestration, representing a negative feedback to climate change. However, the conundrum as to why some SOM decomposes rapidly, while other thermodynamically unstable SOM can persist on centennial time scales (Hedges et al. 2000), leads to substantial uncertainty in model structures, as well as uncertainty in the predictability of the land carbon sink trajectory.