Evidence for the primacy of living root inputs, not root or shoot litter, in forming soil organic carbon
Why is this work in the frame?
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame — the usual design — would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.
Machine scores (provisional)
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
- Teacher spread
- 0.224 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
- Validation status
score_only:v0-immature-baseline· verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it
Abstract
Summary Soil organic carbon (SOC) is primarily formed from plant inputs, but the relative carbon (C) contributions from living root inputs (i.e. rhizodeposits) vs litter inputs (i.e. root + shoot litter) are poorly understood. Recent theory suggests that living root inputs exert a disproportionate influence on SOC formation, but few field studies have explicitly tested this by separately tracking living root vs litter inputs as they move through the soil food web and into distinct SOC pools. We used a manipulative field experiment with an annual C 4 grass in a forest understory to differentially track its living root vs litter inputs into the soil and to assess net SOC formation over multiple years. We show that living root inputs are 2–13 times more efficient than litter inputs in forming both slow‐cycling, mineral‐associated SOC as well as fast‐cycling, particulate organic C. Furthermore, we demonstrate that living root inputs are more efficiently anabolized by the soil microbial community en route to the mineral‐associated SOC pool (dubbed ‘the in vivo microbial turnover pathway’). Overall, our findings provide support for the primacy of living root inputs in forming SOC. However, we also highlight the possibility of nonadditive effects of living root and litter inputs, which may deplete SOC pools despite greater SOC formation rates.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
The record
- Venue
- New Phytologist
- Topic
- Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics
- Field
- Agricultural and Biological Sciences
- Canadian institutions
- —
- Funders
- Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaNational Research Council CanadaInstitute for Biospheric Studies, Yale UniversityNational Science CouncilYale University
- Keywords
- LitterSoil carbonPlant litterCyclingUnderstoryShootAgronomyCarbon cycleEnvironmental scienceBiologyEcosystemSoil waterEcologyCanopyForestry
- Has abstract in OpenAlex
- yes