Journal
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS
Volume 8, Issue -, Pages -Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-01116-z
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Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research [DE-AC02-05CH11231]
- National Science Foundation [DGE 1106400]
- U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Workforce Development for Teachers and Scientists, Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) program
- ORAU [DE-SC0014664]
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Climatic, atmospheric, and land-use changes all have the potential to alter soil microbial activity, mediated by changes in plant inputs. Many microbial models of soil organic carbon (SOC) decomposition have been proposed recently to advance prediction of climate and carbon (C) feedbacks. Most of these models, however, exhibit unrealistic oscillatory behavior and SOC insensitivity to long-term changes in C inputs. Here we diagnose the source of these problems in four archetypal models and propose a density-dependent formulation of microbial turnover, motivated by community-level interactions, that limits population sizes and reduces oscillations. We compare model predictions to 24 long-term C-input field manipulations and identify key benchmarks. The proposed formulation reproduces soil C responses to long-term C-input changes and implies greater SOC storage associated with CO2-fertilization-driven increases in C inputs over the coming century compared to recent microbial models. This study provides a simple modification to improve microbial models for inclusion in Earth System Models.
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