EDI Staging Environment
Soil organic matter (SOM) is a critical linkage among many ecosystem services that sustain our society and life on Earth. It is the primary energy source for microbes and the principal storehouse of water necessary for plant growth. SOM also stores nutrients for plants and sorbs pollutants that otherwise could contaminate food and water supplies. Soils also help regulate climate by storing carbon that would otherwise be released to the atmosphere and contribute to climate change. The SOMMOS project investigated processes in the soil that protect SOM from being decomposed by microbes, processes that increase its sensitivity to environmental changes, and how changes in climate and land management influence the amount and stability of SOM. The project, which was a collaboration between scientists from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), University of Colorado, University of Michigan, Oregon State University, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the USDA-Forest Service, took advantage of soil samples collected across NEON, a major NSF investment in environmental monitoring that covers the entire United States. This continental-scale soil sample set was analyzed for a wide array of physical and chemical properties, well beyond those typically measured on such a large-scale sample set, including radiocarbon, extractable metals, organic matter chemistry by pyrolysis-GCMS, liquid extract fluorescence spectroscopy, and more. In addition to this dataset, archived samples are available from the project for sharing with interested researchers.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
