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Hyperactive soil microbes might weaken the terrestrial carbon sink

The rate at which carbon dioxide is lost from soil has risen faster than the rate at which it is used by land plants, because soil microbes have become more active — possibly weakening the land surface’s ability to act as a carbon sink.
  1. Kiona Ogle

    1. Kiona Ogle is in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, and in the Department of Biology and the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011, USA.

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The terrestrial land surface has a crucial role in the global carbon cycle, providing feedbacks to changes in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide and associated climate change1. Increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and in soil and air temperatures worldwide over the past several decades have been paralleled by an increase in the metabolism of organisms at the land surface — as demonstrated by enhanced rates of CO2 uptake, mainly by plants through photosynthesis, and of CO2 loss from plants and soil microorganisms, mostly owing to respiratory processes2–6. In a paper in Nature, Bond-Lamberty et al.7 report that the rate of increase of CO2 loss is outpacing that of CO2 uptake by plants. The authors attribute the imbalance in these rates of increase to enhanced activity of microbes that obtain nutrition by decomposing or mineralizing organic matter in soil. If the observed trend continues, then respiration by microbes could contribute substantially to global warming by releasing CO2 from organic matter that has previously been stored in soil for decades to millennia.

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Nature 560, 32-33 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-05842-2

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