EDI Staging Environment
Predicting the effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 (eCO2) on soil organic carbon (SOC) is critical to understanding changes to the global carbon cycle. Arid ecosystems have large spatial coverage globally and are known to be a critical component of the global land sink. However, because of low overall organic carbon content, high spatial heterogeneity, and the presence of inorganic carbon, measuring SOC in these environments is challenging. As an example, the intensively studied Nevada Desert Free-Air CO2 Enrichment Facility (NDFF) reports conflicting results regarding the effects of eCO2 on SOC. In this project, we compare our independent analysis of SOC stocks from NDFF and compare the results to the most prominent previous analysis of SOC stocks from the site. We found that eCO2 resulted in losses of SOC under the major plant cover type in this ecosystem but no change in ecosystem SOC stocks due to a lack of treatment effect on SOC in unvegetated soils. This contrasts with a previous analysis of these soils showing a 20% increase in ecosystem SOC stocks (Evans et al., 2014). As of the publication of this data we have not resolved the discrepancy between these two major studies.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
