European Journal of Soil Science最新文献

Soil plays a central role in the global carbon (C) cycle and the fight against climate change as it contains the largest existing organic C stock on earth. Natural processes exacerbated by climate change and unsustainable agricultural soil management practices are contributing to the steady decrease in organic C stocks in farmland. Carbon farming practices, underpinned by various incentives, can be used to maintain and increase C stocks in agricultural soils. Carbon credit mechanisms, that is, tradable credits each corresponding to one tonne of CO₂eq, are one such incentive. Carbon credits are issued upon the demonstration of increased soil C stocks over time through the application of C accounting methodologies for each agroecosystem and farming practice. This study presents a detailed and critical analysis of carbon credit methodologies, focusing on agricultural soil C in temperate zones, by comparing the European Commission proposal for a regulation on carbon removals with relevant certification frameworks implemented in extra-European Union industrialized countries (Australia, Alberta in Canada, United States). Based on this, we recommend strengthening the European Commission proposal by (i) expanding the list of eligible agricultural practices, (ii) setting a minimum maintenance time frame for each agricultural practice and incentivizing longer duration, (iii) setting the Good Agricultural and Environmental Conditions of the European Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as a regulatory baseline, (iv) beyond the regulatory baseline, defining a farm level baseline in terms of carbon farming practices applied that can be monitored through the Integrated Administration and Control System of the CAP, (v) clarifying the interaction between the European Commission proposal of regulation and the CAP, the Soil Monitoring Law, and Land Use/Cover Area Frame Survey inventory, (vi) retaining a portion of unsold carbon credits as a buffer against the risk of reversal and (vii) applying a default discount to account for leakage risk if yield reductions are observed. We propose these recommendations to guarantee effective environmental protection, technical and bureaucratic feasibility as well as economic affordability for farmers.

Current environmental regulations for agriculture in the Netherlands and England focus on the application of certain selected management measures as an empirical basis for providing subsidies. Farmers like this simple, straightforward approach. The link with sustainable development is, however, not defined and this can become problematic when procedures may be challenged in future. A procedure focusing on the measurement of ecosystem services in line with selected UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can provide this link, but whether or not this more complicated procedure will be attractive for farmers is still unclear. The soil science community would be well advised to discuss their future role in developing scientifically sound operational procedures that would be acceptable to both farmers and policy makers and would be aimed at contributing to the sustainable development of society at large.

Courteille, L., Lagacherie, P., Boukhelifa, N., Lutton, E., & Tardieu, L. (2024). Using spatial aggregation of soil multifunctionality maps to support uncertainty-aware planning decisions. European Journal of Soil Science, 75(4), e13523. 10.1111/ejss.13523

In the affiliation list, affiliation 3 is incorrect. It should be:

³UAR 3611 Institut des Systèmes Complexes Paris Ile-de-France, CNRS, Paris, France

The published version of affiliation 3 becomes affiliation 4, and affiliation 4 becomes affiliation 5. This means author Tardieu's affiliations are revised thus:

Léa Tardieu^4,5

We sincerely apologize for this error.

This paper describes a sugarcane farming system on acid sulfate soils (ASS) in coastal, eastern Australia which has improved crop production, increased carbon sequestration, enhanced soil health and controlled drainage discharge to estuaries. The farming system has evolved as a collaboration between innovative sugarcane farmers, researchers and government agencies. The collaboration started when discharge from the farmed coastal floodplain ASS acidified an entire estuary in eastern Australia, wiping out all gilled and benthic organisms for 18 months. The event produced major conflicts between fishers, farmers, the community, entrained researchers and local and state governments. It led to a major initiative to develop sugarcane farming systems which enhanced environmental benefits and increased crop production. Such a win–win system has applicability to other locations with variable resource use conflicts. The system of cane land management adopted on the Tweed site is described.

The European Union has a long-term objective to achieve healthy soils by 2050. The European Commission has proposed a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on Soil Monitoring and Resilience (Soil Monitoring Law, SML), the first stage of which is to focus on setting up a soil monitoring framework and assessing soils throughout the EU. Situated in NW Europe, the UK has substantial experience in soil monitoring over the last half century which may usefully contribute to this wider EU effort. A set of overarching principles have and continue to guide design of national soil monitoring and may prove helpful as other European countries embark on similar monitoring programmes. Therefore, we present the principles of design from five decades of national soil monitoring. The monitoring discussed is based on a stratified-random design, has matured in support of policy questions, and operates over space and time scales relevant to the SML. The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (UKCEH) Countryside Surveys (CS) of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Welsh Government, Environment and Rural Affairs Monitoring and Modelling Programme (ERAMMP) and the England Ecosystem Survey (EES) monitoring programme are national programmes currently operating in the UK. Some important lessons learnt include: adopting a question-based approach; having a clear robust statistical design for the purpose; selecting indicators that address policy and underlying scientific questions; and selecting indicators that can detect change and use robust and well-tested methodologies across a wide range of soil and land use types, remaining valid over long time scales, supporting thinking long-term. Technical lessons learned include the proven cost effectiveness of a stratified-random design including replication, while adopting a common stratification layer of stable environmental attributes aids comparability between monitoring programmes. Common protocols are vital for future intercomparisons, but a full ecosystem approach that includes co-located soil and vegetation samples for interpreting a co-evolving system has proved hugely advantageous. UK monitoring programmes offer a range of experience that may prove valuable to future soil monitoring design to address the major societal challenges of our time, such as maintaining food production and addressing climate change and biodiversity loss.

Facing global changes, substantial modifications in soil microbes and their functions have been widely evidenced and connected. However, the response of soil microbial respiration (MR) to increasing nitrogen (N) deposition and the role of microbial characteristics in controlling this response remain elusive. In this study, we quantified the intensity of the soil MR in terrestrial ecosystems that suffered elevated N deposition. High-throughput quantitative sequencing and phospholipid fatty acids were employed to analyse microbial community properties and biomass, whilst microbial necromass was quantified using biomarker amino sugars. Our results revealed that soil MR kept stable under N deposition. Microorganisms maintained their respiration rates by modifying the characteristics of enzymes rather than altering microbial community properties or biomass. Notably, soil MR increased with latitude across study sites, which was attributed to the restriction of microbial activity by bacterial necromass. Supporting this observation, the recalcitrance of the soil carbon (C) pool to microbial degradation was evidenced to be the stability mechanism underlying the spatial variations in MR. Overall, we propose that MR is resistant to short-term N deposition, whilst it exhibits a pronounced latitude dependence as shaped by the recalcitrant C pool. Our findings provide crucial insights into the microbial mechanisms of soil C dynamics under global change, contributing to the advancement of soil C models.

Manning, D. A. C., de Azevedo, A. C., Zani, C. F., & Barneze, A. S. (2024). Soil carbon management and enhanced rock weathering: The separate fates of organic and inorganic carbon. European Journal of Soil Science, 75(4), e13534. 10.1111/ejss.13534

The reference Jenny (1941a,b) is incorrect in the published version. The reference should be:

Jenny, H. (1941). Factors of soil formation. McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York.

The citation to the reference has been amended accordingly.

We sincerely apologize for this error.

When sulfidic soils become drained, oxidation of pyrite can cause acidification and formation of iron (Fe) oxyhydroxy sulfate phases such as jarosite. Remediation via re-establishment of reducing conditions requires submergence and addition of biodegradable organic carbon (OC) to stimulate activity of reducing bacteria. Addition of straw-derived dissolved organic carbon (DOC) has been shown to induce rapid microbial reduction in sandy sulfuric (pH <4) soils. In clayey sulfuric soil, DOC may be less efficient because of limited availability for microbes due to its sorption to reactive minerals. We tested the possible effect of sorption on the remediative potential of straw-derived DOC using a set of incubation and sorption experiments, and used solid-state ¹³C-NMR spectroscopy for the chemical characterization of OC. The tested materials were a clayey, jarosite-containing sulfuric soil (pH 3), and artificial model soils composed of synthesized jarosite either mixed with quartz powder or quartz powder + clay minerals. The results showed that addition of DOC from wheat straw induces reduction conditions varying with soil sorptivity. For the model soils, DOC sorption was little, and DOC additions of 0.8 mg OC g⁻¹ were sufficient to achieve permanently reducing conditions and an increase in pH to >6.0. In the natural sulfuric soil, much higher DOC additions were needed (1.8 mg OC g⁻¹) to facilitate continuous reducing conditions, but pH increased only to values no higher than 5.0–5.5. The natural soil revealed strong sorption of added DOC. Sorption preferentially reduced the proportion of proteins, while the proportion of lignin components, which can hardly be used by microorganisms under reducing conditions, remained relatively high in solution. Thus, high DOC additions were required to overcome the sorption-induced limitations in OC availability. The results suggest that wheat straw-derived DOC is a promising approach also for remediation of clayey sulfuric soils; however, OC additions need to be adjusted to compensate for possible sorption.

The temperature sensitivity (Q₁₀) of soil organic C (SOC) decomposition is an important parameter to predict C dynamics under climate change. Given that SOC is mainly protected by aggregates and minerals, differentiating the Q₁₀ of the two C fractions helps to explain bulk soil C dynamics. In the present study, we collected agricultural soils from adjacent paddy and upland areas in mid-temperate (Mollisols) and subtropic (Ultisols) regions of China. We employed density fractionation to separate aggregate-protected and free mineral-associated C fractions of soil samples and determined the Q₁₀ of SOC and the two C fractions at 15 and 25°C incubated conditions. Results showed that the Q₁₀ of SOC for Mollisols were lower than that for Ultisols, with an exception of aggregates in upland soils. Aggregate-protected C had lower Q₁₀ than free mineral-associated C, except in the upland Mollisols. The Q₁₀ of SOC was negatively correlated with the proportion of C protected in aggregates, whereas it was positively correlated with the proportions of mass or C of free minerals. Given that the mass and C proportion of aggregates in bulk soils of Mollisols were 271% and 80% higher than of Ultisols, respectively, the SOC of Mollisols exhibited lower Q₁₀ than Ultisols. Therefore, stronger soil aggregation and higher proportion of aggregate-protected C contributed to the lower temperature sensitivity of SOC in Mollisols. Consequently, agricultural practices aimed at promoting soil aggregation will alleviate SOC loss under future global warming scenarios.