Heating alone won’t drive soil microbes to release more carbon dioxide — they need added carbon and nutrients to thrive. This finding challenges assumptions about how climate warming influences soil emissions.
Heating alone won’t drive soil microbes to release more carbon dioxide — they need added carbon and nutrients to thrive. This finding challenges assumptions about how climate warming influences soil emissions.
This is a good experiment. I like that they look at depleted soils, as it’s showing what happens to marginal soils when heated and helps fill in the picture of what we can expect to see during climate change. This also improves modeling accuracy.
Kentucky soils (or was it Georgian?) are depleted from cropping but are also naturally low in nutrients as they are in warmer climates and the nutrient pool has already been naturally depleted from pre-ag biomass and then by Ag itself.
They aren’t saying warming won’t increase emissions. They are saying you need warming and a system like the boreal, prairies or organic soils to see the impact.
Warming in these systems increases soil microbial activity and mineralisation of the organic matter which yields CO2