Soil organic carbon is not just for soil scientists: measurement recommendations for diverse practitioners

Abstract

Soil organic carbon (SOC) regulates terrestrial ecosystem functioning, provides diverse energy sources for soil microorganisms, governs soil structure, and regulates the availability of organically bound nutrients. Investigators in increasingly diverse disciplines recognize how quantifying SOC attributes can provide insight about ecological states and processes. Today, multiple research networks collect and provide SOC data, and robust, new technologies are available for managing, sharing, and analyzing large data sets. We advocate that the scientific community capitalize on these developments to augment SOC data sets via standardized protocols. We describe why such efforts are important and the breadth of disciplines for which it will be helpful, and outline a tiered approach for standardized sampling of SOC and ancillary variables that ranges from simple to more complex. We target scientists ranging from those with little to no background in soil science to those with more soil-related expertise, and offer examples of the ways in which the resulting data can be organized, shared, and discoverable.

Reviews and syntheses: The promise of big diverse soil data, moving current practices towards future potential

“…Data providers will often ask "what should I measure?" to be relevant to data aggregation efforts, and there are efforts to provide such guidance (Billings et al, 2021). We have chosen instead to focus on critical spatiotemporal information to allow data to be expanded, contextualized, and annotated.…”

Comment on bg-2021-323

“…Soils are inherently rooted in time and space, making high resolution spatial and temporal information (including sampling date, latitude, longitude, and geographic datum, and depth of sample) critical for building context and data reuse. Data providers will often ask 'what should I measure' to be relevant to data aggregation efforts, and there are efforts to provide such guidance (Billings et al, 2021). We have chosen instead to focus on critical temporal-location information to allow data to be expanded, contextualized, and annotated.…”

Ecological stoichiometry as a foundation for omics-enabled biogeochemical models of soil organic matter decomposition

“…We see a ripe opportunity for harmonizing microbial and biogeochemical SOM models within and across all scales through substrate (plant and microbial) chemistries, which determine SOM composition (from a biogeochemical perspective) as well as the rate and pathway of microbial metabolism (from a microbial perspective). Billings et al (2021) have identified SOM chemistry as a measurement for the next generation of soil C research, highlighting the increasing usage of molecular advances such as Fourier-Transformed Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR, Cheng et al 2006;Keiluweit et al 2010), mid-infrared spectral libraries (Dangal et al 2019), and Diffuse Reflectance Fourier-Transformed Infrared (DRIFTS, Kaiser and Ellerbrock 2005;Leue et al 2010). Substrate chemistry is represented in fine-scale biogeochemical models (e.g.…”

“…This topic has received considerable attention from multiple scientific domains over the past few decades, resulting in parallel advances between biogeochemical and microbial research (Fig. 1) and calls for greater diversity of measurements used within biogeochemical models (Billings et al 2021). Collectively, we have made outstanding progress in our understanding of global C cycles; however, a key opportunity remains in integrating theoretical and modelling frameworks from different scientific domains.…”