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Nature Climate Change highlights EESA research on soil organic matter decomposition temperature sensitivity1 min read

by Christina Procopiou on October 9, 2020

Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division

A recent paper by Jinyun Tang and Bill Riley that analyzed how soil organic matter (SOM) decomposition is affected by temperature was highlighted in the October issue of Nature Climate Change. CO2 released from soil is one of the largest actively cycling components of the global carbon cycle and strongly affects predicted 21st century climate change. Scientists study these carbon-climate feedbacks using Earth System Models, such as DOE’s E3SM, which represent a wide variety of terrestrial ecosystem processes, including (SOM) decomposition. 

This new research addresses the long-standing problem of how to estimate and interpret the temperature sensitivity of SOM decomposition, an important problem as the climate continues to warm. Applied over the past several decades in hundreds of studies, the traditional approach involves warming soils at different temperatures in the laboratory to increase soil respiration, and applying an assumed model structure to interpret those measurements.

Tang and Riley showed that this approach leads to very large uncertainty (termed equifinality) in inferences of SOM decomposition temperature sensitivity. They also showed that using new model structures that explicitly represent microbial processes can help reduce this uncertainty and improve interpretation of these types of experiments. Their group is working to integrate these new types of model structures into E3SM’s land model.

Riley, a senior scientist in the Climate and Ecosystem Sciences Division at Berkeley Lab, said that the findings discussed in their paper for Biogeochemistry Letters could improve the ability of climate modelers to accurately predict the impacts future climate warming will have on the large amount of carbon stored globally in soil.

News & Events

Chun Chang Places Second in Annual Berkeley Lab Pitch Competition3 min read

January 18, 2023

Commercializing Berkeley Lab inventions is an important part of the Lab’s mission, and one that requires strong communication skills. For example, Lab inventors need to be able to pitch their ideas to external partners and potential funders.  The annual Berkeley Lab Pitch Competition occurred on October 27, 2022 and is a part of an entrepreneurship…

EESA Scientists Collaborate With Universities to bring Environmental Science Research Opportunities and Training to Students Underrepresented in STEM3 min read

January 13, 2023

  EESA researchers are collaborators in three of the 41 projects awarded in December by DOE through its Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) initiative.  RENEW aims to build foundations for research at institutions that have been historically underrepresented in the Office of Science (SC) research portfolio. The initiative provides opportunities for undergraduate and…

New Report Explores Revolutionary Environmental Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure5 min read

January 10, 2023

In a collaborative effort between the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER) and DOE’s Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) program, as well as with community experts, the Artificial Intelligence for Earth System Predictability (AI4ESP) workshop was held from October through December 2021. BER developed the process as the Model-Experiment paradigm, or ModEx, and a report released this fall outlines the key takeaways of last year’s event.

A Q&A With Postdoc Kunxiaoja Yuan3 min read

January 4, 2023

  Kunxiaojia Yuan received her Bachelor’s of Engineering in remote sensing and Ph.D. in geographic information engineering from Wuhan University. She is a postdoctoral researcher in EESA, with a research focus on global carbon, energy, and water cycle analysis and model evaluation using machine learning and causal inference. What motivated you to pursue a postdoc…

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