Items

• 

  Drivers of the amount of organic carbon protected inside soil aggregates estimated by crushing: A meta-analysis

  Given the importance of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks and their dynamics in the regulation of climate change, understanding the mechanisms of SOC protection from decomposition is crucial. It is recognized that soil aggregates can provide effective protection of organic carbon from microbial decomposition. Currently, there is no systematic method for estimating the amount of protected carbon within aggregates. However, differences between CO2 emissions from incubation of intact versus crushed aggregates have been widely used as a proxy for SOC physical protection within aggregates. There is no global analysis on this type of experiment yet, nor on the drivers of the amount of SOC physically protected in soils. Using a meta-analysis including 165 pairs of observations from 22 studies encompassing a variety of ecosystems, climate and soil types, we investigated the crushing effects on cumulative carbon mineralization from laboratory incubation experiments. The aggregates were initially separated by either wet sieving or dry sieving before dry crushing. Our results indicated that aggregate crushing led on average to +31 % stimulation of carbon mineralization compared with intact aggregates, which represented 0.65 to 1.01 % of total SOC. This result suggests the mineralization of a previously protected pool of labile organic carbon. The linear regression analysis showed that the crushing effect on carbon mineralization depended on soil characteristics (carbon content, clay content and pH) as well as on aggregate size. Crushing aggregates stimulated carbon mineralization relative to control, up to +63 % in large aggregates (>10 mm), +38 % in large macro-aggregates (2–8 mm), +14 % in small macro-aggregates (0.25–2 mm) and +54 % in micro-aggregates (<0.25 mm). Within each aggregate size-class, the crushing effect depended on the crushing intensity. The destruction of aggregates to <0.05 mm size had a greater effect on carbon mineralization (+130–133 %) than the destruction of aggregates to >2 mm (+3 to 40 %), < 2 mm (+58 to 62 %) and < 0.25 mm (+32 to 62 %) sizes regardless of the initial aggregate size. These results suggest that macroaggregates (>0.25 mm) are less protective than microaggregates (<0.25 mm). Our dataset also show that soil physicochemical characteristics and experimental conditions influenced more the amount of protected SOC than land use and management. Contrary to our expectations the crushing effect was not affected by tillage practices nor land use. Standardizing the experimental conditions of aggregate crushing and subsequent incubation is needed to assess and compare the amount of physically protected SOC in diverse soils, and then to better understand the processes and drivers of SOC protection inside aggregates.
• 

  Soil organic and inorganic carbon sequestration by consecutive biochar application: Results from a decade field experiment

  Biochar addition can expand soil organic carbon (SOC) stock and has potential ability in mitigating climate change. Also, some incubation experiments have shown that biochar can increase soil inorganic carbon (SIC) contents. However, there is no direct evidence for this from the field experiment. In order to make up the sparseness of available data resulting from the long-term effect of biochar amendment on soil carbon fractions, here we detected the contents and stocks of the bulk SIC and SOC fractions based on a 10-year field experiment of consecutive biochar application in Shandong Province, China. There are three biochar treatments as no-biochar (control), and biochar application at 4.5 Mg ha−1 year−1 (B4.5) and 9.0 Mg ha−1 year−1 (B9.0), respectively. The results showed that biochar application significantly enhanced SIC content (3.2%–24.3%), >53 μm particulate organic carbon content (POC, 38.2%–166.2%) and total soil organic carbon content (15.8%–82.2%), compared with the no-biochar control. However, <53 μm silt–clay-associated organic carbon (SCOC) content was significantly decreased (14%–27%) under the B9.0 treatment. Our study provides the direct field evidence that SIC contributed to carbon sequestration after the biochar application, and indicates that the applied biochar was allocated mainly in POC fraction. Further, the decreased SCOC and increased microbial biomass carbon contents observed in field suggest that the biochar application might exert a positive priming effect on native soil organic carbon.