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High stocks of soil organic carbon in the North American Arctic region

Nature Geoscience volume 1, pages 615–619 (2008)Cite this article

Abstract

The Arctic soil organic-carbon pool is a significant, but poorly constrained, carbon store. The most cited pool size estimates are based on a study that severely undersamples Arctic soils, with only five out of the 48 soils examined actually from the Arctic region. Furthermore, previous measurements have been confined to the top 40 cm of soil. Here, we present 1-m-deep measurements of soil organic carbon obtained at 117 locations in the North American Arctic region. To this dataset we add previously published measurements to generate a total sample size of 139 North American Arctic soils. We show that soil organic-carbon stores are highly dependent on landscape type, being highest in lowland and hilly upland soils, where values average 55.1 and 40.6 kg soil organic carbon m−2 respectively, and lowest in rubbleland and mountain soils, where values average 3.4 and 3.8 kg soil organic carbon m−2 respectively. Extrapolating our measurements using known distributions of landscape types we estimate that the total organic carbon pool in North American Arctic soils, together with the average amount of carbon per unit area, is considerably higher than previously thought. Our estimates of the depth distribution and total amount of organic carbon in North American Arctic soils will form an important basis for studies examining the impact of climate warming on CO2 release in the region.

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Figure 1: Study-site locations.
Figure 2: The effect of Arctic latitudinal bioclimate gradient on landscape stores of SOC.

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Acknowledgements

The following National Science Foundation projects contributed to this work: Arctic Transitions in the Land-Atmosphere System, the Flux Study, Biocomplexity of the Arctic System, and Arctic Coastal Transfer. Also significant contributions from the US Department of Agric. Hatch Project and Global Change Initiative, and Hilmar Maier for help with mapping data.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agriculture and Forestry Experiment Station, University of Alaska Fairbanks, 533 E. Fireweed, Palmer, Alaska 99645, USA

    Chien-Lu Ping & Gary J. Michaelson

  2. Alaska Biological Research, Fairbanks, Alaska 99708, Box 80410, USA

    Mark T. Jorgenson

  3. Professional Soil Scientist, 151 East Hill Church Road, Addison, New York 14801, USA

    John M. Kimble

  4. Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia 22904, PO Box 400123, USA

    Howard Epstein

  5. Geophysical Institute, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska 99775, PO Box 755780, USA

    Vladimir E. Romanovsky

  6. Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, Alaska 99775, PO Box 757000, USA

    Donald A. Walker

Authors
  1. Chien-Lu Ping
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  2. Gary J. Michaelson
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  3. Mark T. Jorgenson
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  4. John M. Kimble
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  5. Howard Epstein
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  6. Vladimir E. Romanovsky
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  7. Donald A. Walker
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Contributions

C.L.P. initiated, conceived and coordinated the paper; G.J.M. contributed to the concept, data analysis and writing; M.T.J., J.M.K., H.E., V.E.R. and D.A.W. contributed to data collection and writing.

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Correspondence to Chien-Lu Ping.

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Ping, CL., Michaelson, G., Jorgenson, M. et al. High stocks of soil organic carbon in the North American Arctic region. Nature Geosci 1, 615–619 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo284

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