National Resource Conservation Service Climate Literacy
The USDA California Climate Hub has joined forces with the NRCS to help their staff learn about how to have conversations with producers about climate change and their conservation practices that mitigation climate.
How do soil amendments impact the soil microbial life?
We are looking at how rock dust being spread on farm land impacts the soil life. Rock dust is being used on soils in order to sequester CO2 from the air because the rock interacts with the CO2 in the air to form carbonate and draws down the carbon. This could be a promising solution to help mitigate climate. It also has other co-benefits like it can be used as a lime alternative and may reduce excess nitrous oxide emissions.
Link to our findings:
Can Indigenous burning practices put more carbon and more persistent carbon into the soils?
We have been learning from the Karuk tribe about their burning practices. We hope to help them bring fire back on the land after the suppression era by showing how beneficial these practices are to soil carbon and wildfire reduction.
Why is soil science so shallow?
We are exploring why the average soil sampling depth since 2000 in the top four soil journals is 23 cm. Please help us in understanding why this may be and what prevents us from studying deeper soils by taking this five-minute survey. We intend to publish the results of this in a perspective paper in anticipation of deepening the discussion within our community about why we are mostly sampling topsoils as well as the barriers that prevent us from going deeper.
How will warming impact soil carbon storage and persistence and what does mineralogy have to do with it?
Deep soils store more than 70% of global SOC, and increased SOC decomposition and CO2 emissions caused by warming are potentially large climate change feedbacks. However, uncertainty remains in our process-level understanding and ability to quantify how projected warming will impact the stability of deep soils. In order to answer these questions we are collecting soils from different types of parent material (rock types) and doing an incubation in the lab mimicking a warming of 4 degrees. We are going from the topsoil to bedrock and will estimate soil carbon stock, persistence, and characterize the mineralogy.
Deep Critical Zone Biogeochemistry
An entire team of critical zone scientist are working to understand how essential nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycle from the top of the trees through soil and down into bedrock. How carbon cycles through the critical zone, specifically deep soil carbon is my main project. Soils stores two times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and vegetation combined making it an important carbon storage pool. The ability to store lots of carbon for long periods of time caused soils to gain global attention in the climate change conversation.
Links to Project Info and Papers:
Soil Organic Matter in the Critical Zone
Deep in the Sierra Nevada critical zone: saprock represents a large terrestrial organic carbon stock
Climatic controls on soil and saprock nitrogen distribution and persistence in the Sierra Nevada
How does sea level rise impact mangroves?
It all begins with an idea. Mangroves are submerged and drained everyday, would mangroves experiencing long periods of submersion be impacted?