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Soil carbon losses due to priming moderated by adaptation and legacy effects

Nature Geoscience volume 16, pages 909–914 (2023)Cite this article

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Abstract

Increasing soil organic carbon contents contributes to global climate change mitigation. However, new plant inputs can enhance the mineralization of native soil organic carbon by the positive priming effect, which may counterbalance the sequestration of new carbon. Here we use soils from a 20 year chronosequence of inverted pasture soils (reciprocal translocation of topsoil and subsoil to >1 m) to study the dynamics of soil organic carbon in topsoils and subsoils. We evaluated the root-induced priming effect by differentiating native soil organic carbon from 13C root-derived carbon in a 6 month incubation experiment. We found that the addition of fresh root-derived carbon caused positive priming of native soil organic carbon in new topsoils (109 ± 27% additional respiration compared with controls without roots) and subsoils (331 ± 84%) after inversion. This effect was temporary for new topsoils as they accumulated soil organic carbon and adapted to high carbon inputs within a few years, leading to no priming in the long term. In contrast, buried topsoils became more sensitive to root carbon inputs over time, demonstrating how the legacy of high carbon inputs mediates the magnitude of priming (50% to 390% after 20 years of inversion). Overall, carbon losses with priming never exceeded new root-derived carbon inputs. We conclude that priming is a temporary reaction to additional carbon, which attenuates when soils adapt to high carbon inputs within a few years to decades.

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Fig. 1: SOC contents, microbial biomass and respiration of native SOC.
Fig. 2: Priming effect with roots in topsoils and subsoils.
Fig. 3: Allocation of root-derived C within fractions.
Fig. 4: Gains in root-derived C and loss of native SOC with net balance.

Data availability

All data are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7304562.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation under project no. 200021_178768 (M.S. and S.A.) and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme as part of the EJPSoil project under grant agreement no. 862695 (A.D.). Additional support was provided by the Sustainable Agroecosystem programme at the New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research, with funding from the Strategic Science Investment Funded provided by the New Zealand Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment (M.H.B). We thank C. Tregurtha and F. Hegewald for assistance with the soil sampling and S.-L. Bellè for his support in the laboratory. We also thank the soil organic matter group at the Thünen Institute of Climate-Smart Agriculture and the Research group on Organic Matter in soil and sediments at the Ecole Normale Supérieure Paris (ROMENS) for discussions and comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Marcus Schiedung

  2. Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Marcus Schiedung

  3. Thünen Institute of Climate‐Smart Agriculture, Braunschweig, Germany

    Axel Don

  4. New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, Lincoln, New Zealand

    Michael H. Beare

  5. Département de Géosciences, CNRS, École Normale Supérieure, PSL University, Paris, France

    Samuel Abiven

  6. CEREEP-Ecotron Ile De France, ENS, CNRS, PSL University, St-Pierre-lès-Nemours, France

    Samuel Abiven

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  1. Marcus Schiedung
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Contributions

M.S. conceptualized and designed the experiment with A.D., M.H.B. and S.A. M.S. conducted the experiment and performed all laboratory analyses. M.S. conducted the data analysis and wrote the manuscript with contributions from all authors. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Marcus Schiedung or Samuel Abiven.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Soil inversion and input of labelled roots.

Concept of soil inversion (a) showing the non-inverted soil with SOC-rich topsoil. The inversion brings the former topsoil in the new subsoil and a new topsoil in created consisting of former subsoil. Set up of pre-incubation and growth of ryegrass under 13C enriched environment (10 atm%) to achieve highly labelled root input (b). The ryegrass seeds were placed on a 2 mm nylon mesh (black dotted line) to allow germination into the soil. After 22 days, aboveground biomass was removed directly at the mesh and soils were mixed prior to the division into the four replicates (equal weight) used for the closed jar incubation (c). The roots were cut during homogenization into 0.5-1 cm large pieces. The respired CO2 was trapped in NaOH traps to determine the total respiration by conductivity. By determining the isotopic composition of the trapped CO2 (precipitated as SrCO3), the contribution of native SOC and root-derived C was calculated (see method section). The isotopic signature of the rood-derived C allowed to trace it in the soils and within SOC fraction separated as particulate organic matter (POM) and mineral associated organic matter (MAOM; divided in sand & aggregate ( > 63 µm) and silt & clay ( < 63 µm) particle sizes).

Extended Data Fig. 2 Total CO2 production six months of incubation.

The cumulative total CO2-C production is shown per mass of soil (a & b) and the specific production is given per total SOC, including native SOC and root-derived C (c & d). All values are presented with the standard error of the mean of incubation replicates (n = 4, also shown as circles). Significant differences between the years since inversion were identified by analysis of variance (ANOVA) and p-values were computed on a 95% pairwise confidence interval with a post hoc-test (Tukey) and a Bonferroni multiplicity adjustment as indicated by letters (p < 0.05). All p-values are presented in Supplementary Table S6 and S7. The cumulative fluxes over the incubation time are shown in Supplementary Fig. S1.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Native SOC and root-derived C specific CO2 production.

Cumulative CO2 production over six months as native SOC specific [mg CO2-Cnative SOC (g native SOC)-1] respiration (a), root-derived C specific [mg CO2-Croot-derived SOC (g root-derived C)-1] (b) respiration and proportion of root-derived C (CO2-Croot-derived) of total respired CO2-C at each timestep (c) for topsoil and subsoils. Error bars indicate the propagated standard error of the mean over the days of incubation of the incubation replicates (n = 4).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Priming effect in inverted soils with roots.

Additional native SOC respiration of inverted soils (3-20 years) with fitted two-tailed linear regression over time since inversion for topsoils (a; R² = 0.66, p < 0.001) and subsoils (b; R² = 0.14, p = 0.09). Grey linear model for subsoils (b; R² = 0.96, p < 0.001) shows the fit excluding the soil inverted seven years ago.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Incubated root-derived C in particulate organic matter.

Proportion of root-derived C remained after the incubation in the particulate organic matter (POM) fraction. The proportion of root derived C after the growth (pre-incubation) and before the incubation are shown in Supplementary Table S2. Linear models with time since inversion are shown in Supplementary Fig. S5.

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Supplementary Figs. 1–4 and Tables 1–7.

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Schiedung, M., Don, A., Beare, M.H. et al. Soil carbon losses due to priming moderated by adaptation and legacy effects. Nat. Geosci. 16, 909–914 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-023-01275-3

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