USGS Soil Carbon Research @ Menlo Park
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| the deep soil carbon project | ||
Here a soil sample is removed from the soil corer. The core will then
be split into distinct soil horizons and transported to a lab for further processing and
analysis. Data from this USGS core will be combined with other data from USGS, USDA, USFS,
UAF-LTER, Michigan State University, and University of Guelph (to name a few!) to create an
Alaska-wide database on soil carbon storage. This database will be a part of the new
National Soil Carbon Network. Click on this picture for a larger version. |
Goals The loss of soil carbon of northern high latitude terrestrial ecosystems in response to climate warming has the potential to act as a positive feedback to climate warming (McGuire et al. 2006, 2007). It is possible that losses of carbon storage will substantially offset carbon sequestration efforts both in Alaska and elsewhere in the United States. Therefore, it is important to assess the state of deep soil organic carbon storage in Alaska and how the state of that carbon storage may change in response to projected climatic change. This project will improve our knowledge of soil carbon in Alaska by:
In interior Alaska, soil carbon storage has been measured in hundreds of locations by a number of investigators and surveyors, yet local to regional variations in C storage and changes in storage (flux) remain highly uncertain. Geologic substrate and topography have been identified as over-riding "state" factors for surface hydrology and soil drainage, which in turn explain some of the spatial variations in soil carbon storage. Fire history and stand age play a clear role in near-surface soil carbon. Vegetation class and permafrost characteristics have been associated with both hydrology and soil mapping units. Currently, however, the average size of soil polygons in Alaska (map units) is 50,000 km2 while the scale for associative variations in hydrologic, vegetation, and permafrost associations are on the order of tens to hundreds of meters. Moreover, hydrology, permafrost, and vegetation associations are themselves changing at unprecedented rates in response to regional warming. While various efforts are underway by a number of federal agencies to improve our understanding of soil processes and soil vulnerabilities in Alaska for various purposes (forest cover; agricultural resources in targeted areas; wetland mapping; deep soil vulnerable to wildfires), efforts to combine and synthesize existing data continue to elude the rapid pace at which these systems are changing. Of particular importance are carbon storage estimates for deep soils, as these soils may be particularly vulnerable to decomposition from warming soils and fire disturbance in the region. Modeling Approaches To improve our understanding of these associations we will compile and synthesize of available existing data on soil organic carbon in interior Alaska in the development of statistical models that will estimate soil carbon storage at 1-km resolution across the landscape based on associations between landscape features and fire history. These statistical models will allow us to estimate soil organic carbon storage and its uncertainty at the regional scale. This information will also be incorporated into a biogeochemical modeling framework and us to identify strategies for reducing uncertainties in estimating regional carbon dynamics in Alaska. The results of this assessment will provide policy makers with information about the degree to which carbon sequestration efforts in Alaska and elsewhere in the United States may be offset by responses of carbon storage in ecosystems in interior Alaska. For more information
see all of our Alaska-based research... back to the projects page... |
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U.S. Department of the Interior |
U.S. Geological Survey
URL: http://carbon.wr.usgs.gov/deepsoil.html
Page Contact Information: Kristen Manies
Page Last Modified: Tuesday, 30-Jun-2009 18:31:46 EDT
