A perspective on greenhouse gas emission studies integrating arbuscular mycorrhiza

Abstract

Climate change is a global emergency. It is only possible to pace down global change through addressing the triggers of it, greenhouse gas emissions. Despite commendable progress, we think that there is plenty of room to further make the studies addressing global change realistic, through integrating into them biotic interactions. We make a case for this statement through a bibliometrics analysis on agricultural studies exploring greenhouse gas emissions that consider arbuscular mycorrhiza. We show that even though mycorrhizal studies account right now for a small fraction of the agricultural literature, they get cited more often. We further demonstrate that mycorrhizal studies are typically more descriptive in their nature, which we support through comparing the keywords they list. We subsequently use the opportunity to identify shortcomings and opportunities to further integrate mycorrhiza into agricultural studies assaying greenhouse gas emissions. We finally make a call to better integrate arbuscular mycorrhiza into global change studies.