Soil microbial carbon pump: Mechanism and appraisal
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s42832-020-0052-4
REVIEW
Soil microbial carbon pump: Mechanism and appraisal Chao Liang* Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Article history:
The soil microbial carbon pump (MCP) conceptualizes a sequestration mechanism based on
Received May 13, 2020
the process of microbial production of a set of new organic compounds, which carry the carbon
Revised July 7, 2020 Accepted July 13, 2020
from plant, through microbial anabolism, and enter into soil where it can be stabilized by the entombing effect. Understanding soil MCP and its related entombing effect is essential to the
Keywords:
stewardship of ecosystem services, provided by microbial necromass in the formation and stabilization of soil organic matter as well as its resilience and vulnerability to global change.
Microbial carbon pump
The mechanism and appraisal of soil MCP, however, remain to be elucidated. This lack of
Microbial necromass
knowledge hampers the improvement of climate models and the development of land use
Biomarker
policies. Here, I overview available knowledge to provide insights on the nature of the soil MCP
Soil carbon stabilization
in the context of two main aspects, i.e., internal features and external constraints that
Soil organic matter
mechanistically influence the soil MCP operation and ultimately influence microbial necromass
Global change
dynamics. The approach of biomarker amino sugars for investigation of microbial necromass and the methodological limitations are discussed. Finally, I am eager to call new investigations to obtain empirical data in soil microbial necromass research area, which urgently awaits synthesized quantitative and modeling studies to relate to soil carbon cycling and climate change. © Higher Education Press 2020
1 Introduction The carbon (C) cycle plays a key role in regulating Earth’s global temperature by influencing the amount of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, in the atmosphere. Whether or not terrestrial ecosystem can serve as net C sink to mitigate climate change in the coming decades is a matter of great interest. Terrestrial ecosystems have the potential to store C, as CO2 is fixed in plants as biomass (representing a shortterm C storage pool) via the process of photosynthesis, and further converts a portion of those plant biomass into the soil organic C (SOC) pool by microbial metabolic activities that lead to a long-term C storage (Schimel and Schaeffer, 2012;
* Corresponding authors E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Liang)
Liang et al., 2017). The SOC pool, as twice the size of the atmospheric C pool, is the largest dynamic terrestrial C pool, so even small changes in it are so large that they could have a significant impact on atmospheric CO2 level (Eswaran et al., 1993; Stockmann et al., 2013). Microorganisms have now been considered important as both the primary agents of SOC decomposition and the dominant agents of SOC formation, understanding C dynamics in soils therefore stems
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