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MBL Senior Scientist Zoe Cardon co-authored this study and is lead principal investigator on two of the Department of Energy grants that supported it.

Plants can capture CO₂ from the atmosphere and turn it into building blocks they use to grow. Ultimately, they send a large portion below ground through their roots. When undisturbed, that new organic material stays in place and builds up in soil for millennia, particularly when it becomes associated with soil minerals. As a result, soils are the largest carbon reservoir on Earth, storing more CO₂ than the atmosphere and vegetation combined.

But a recently published article in  shows that plants likely also release some of that stored soil carbon from minerals. Researchers will need to figure out when plants do this to understand how the soil carbon reservoir might change in the future.

Source: Plants improve soil carbon storage, but they can disrupt it too, according to researchers at UNIL | University of Lausanne