Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

Researchers at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center report the results of a six-year experiment in which doubling the atmospheric greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO₂) in a scrub oak ecosystem caused a reduction in carbon storage in the soil. The scientists said these findings add a new perspective on the capacity of Earth’s soils to store carbon and a measure of caution suggesting that elevated CO₂, by altering microbial communities, may turn the soil from a potential carbon sink into a carbon source. This could offset some of the gains in carbon storage in plant biomass due to increased growth at elevated CO₂.

Previous studies (including the present study) have shown that plants will respond to higher CO₂ by increasing growth and taking up much of the excess carbon. This has led some to speculate that plants may be able to mitigate increases in atmospheric CO₂ and that soils, which represent the largest and most stable terrestrial carbon pool, also may serve as a sink for excess carbon.

During the course of their study, Smithsonian scientists found that the amount of carbon in the ecosystem as a whole increased. However, they also saw a consistent loss in soil carbon under high CO₂ conditions. The CO2 loss from soils offset about 52 percent of the additional carbon that had accumulated in the plants above ground and in the roots. “We were surprised to find that these soils were losing soil carbon despite the fact that there was more plant growth,” said Patrick Megonigal, a microbial ecologist at SERC and one of the study’s authors. “We thought that higher plant growth at elevated CO₂ would either add more carbon to soils, or at least leave it the same. We now need to consider a third possibility—the carbon already in soils will end up back in the atmosphere as a greenhouse gas.”

The study will be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Working at a long-term Smithsonian experimental CO₂ site in a Florida scrub oak ecosystem, the researchers compared core samples from test plots that had been exposed to six years of elevated CO₂ and core samples from plots exposed to ambient CO2. They also performed laboratory experiments on soils from both elevated and ambient plots to understand microbial composition and activity within each type of soil.

Their study reveals that added CO₂ has a so-called “priming effect,” stimulating certain microbes and increasing decomposition. Soils exposed to the elevated CO₂ had higher relative abundances of fungi and higher activities of a soil carbon-degrading enzyme. As the fungi and enzymes decompose the organic matter in the soil, they free up stored carbon and release it through respiration as CO₂. With the priming effect of added CO₂, more soil decomposition results in higher respiration rates, an overall loss of carbon and an increase in the release of CO₂ from the soil.

Study authors are: Karen Carney, a SERC post-doctoral fellow at the time of the study and now at the U.S. Agency for International Development; Bruce Hungate, Northern Arizona University Professor; Bert Drake, SERC plant physiologist; and Patrick Megonigal, SERC microbial ecologist.

The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., near the Chesapeake Bay, is the leading national research center for understanding environmental issues in the coastal zone. The world’s coastal zones are home to more than 70 percent of the global population and subject to intensive activity. Through interdisciplinary, experimental research, SERC scientists are working to understand how ecosystems interact and are linked in this critical zone where the land meets the sea, and how physical and chemical processes sustain life on Earth.