CAREER: Soil Carbon Loss under Global Change: Unearthing Opportunities for Climate Mitigation

This Early Career Development (CAREER) grant centers on understanding the historical loss of soil carbon due to ecosystem degradation and its role in exacerbating climate change. Soil carbon is vital in regulating the Earth's climate system. Its loss due to human activities significantly impacts global warming and ecological balance. The project will quantify historical soil carbon loss due to human activities, and explore strategies to reverse this trend, aiming to transform soils into robust carbon sinks for climate mitigation. The proposed research offers extensive societal benefits, impacting climate policy and awareness, enhancing climate predictability, and aiding climate mitigation through soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas emission reduction. It will advance scientific discovery and promote learning through a university-level course and a high school summer camp, introducing students to climate science data. Furthermore, the research aims to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in science, fostering an inclusive community. By enhancing research and education infrastructure and leveraging networks and partnerships, the project will disseminate results broadly and provide open-source data and tools to understand and mitigate climate change. This research-education nexus is designed to inspire future leaders and foster societal readiness for better climate management. This research is structured around four key objectives, each addressing uncertainties in the quantification of some of the largest soil carbon fluxes associated with anthropogenic impacts. The first objective is to quantify recent trends in soil carbon stocks in intact ecosystems, providing critical insights into how these natural sinks have been influenced by climate change. The second objective is a global assessment of carbon fluxes due to wetland degradation, a significant factor in the global carbon budget and its impact on contemporary warming. The third objective focuses on evaluating historical and future greenhouse gas emissions associated with livestock grazing. These three first objectives are primarily based on data synthesis of field measurements and statistical modeling. The fourth and final objective employs a novel bookkeeping approach to track both losses and gains in soil carbon stocks linked to land-use change. This involves integrating a wide range of field-based data sources, including data generated in objectives 1-3, with land-cover satellite data, to construct a comprehensive and dynamic monitoring system of soil carbon fluxes. Together, these objectives will provide a robust, multi-faceted understanding of soil carbon dynamics, delivering compelling evidence crucial for global climate policy and contributing significantly to ecosystem ecology and climate science. The research will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students and a postdoctoral scholar, and outreach to high school students. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.