• DOI:10.1038/nature10386
• Corpus ID: 3461265

Persistence of soil organic matter as an ecosystem property

@article{Schmidt2011PersistenceOS,
  title={Persistence of soil organic matter as an ecosystem property},
  author={Michael W. I. Schmidt and Margaret S. Torn and Samuel Abiven and Thorsten Dittmar and Georg Guggenberger and Ivan A. Janssens and Markus Kleber and Ingrid K{\"o}gel‐Knabner and Johannes Lehmann and David A. C. Manning and Paolo Nannipieri and Daniel P. Rasse and Steve Weiner and Susan E. Trumbore},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2011},
  volume={478},
  pages={49-56}
}

• M. Schmidt, M. Torn, +11 authors S. Trumbore
• Published 6 October 2011
• Environmental Science
• Nature

Globally, soil organic matter (SOM) contains more than three times as much carbon as either the atmosphere or terrestrial vegetation. Yet it remains largely unknown why some SOM persists for millennia whereas other SOM decomposes readily—and this limits our ability to predict how soils will respond to climate change. Recent analytical and experimental advances have demonstrated that molecular structure alone does not control SOM stability: in fact, environmental and biological controls predominate. Here we propose ways to include this understanding in a new generation of experiments and soil carbon models, thereby improving predictions of the SOM response to global warming.