From a long line of missing things in climate models and the University of Texas at Austin:
Symbiotic fungi inhabiting plant roots have major impact on atmospheric carbon, scientists say
AUSTIN, Texas — Microscopic fungi that live in plants’ roots play a major role in the storage and release of carbon from the soil into the atmosphere, according to a University of Texas at Austin researcher and his colleagues at Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. The role of these fungi is currently unaccounted for in global climate models.
Some types of symbiotic fungi can lead to 70 percent more carbon stored in the soil.
“Natural fluxes of carbon between the land and atmosphere are enormous and play a crucial role in regulating the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, in turn, Earth’s climate,” said Colin Averill, lead author on the study and graduate student in the College of Natural Sciences at UT Austin. “This analysis clearly establishes that the different types of symbiotic fungi that colonize plant roots exert major control on the global carbon cycle, which has not been fully appreciated or demonstrated until now.”
“This research is not only relevant to models and predictions of future concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases, but also challenges the core foundation in modern biogeochemistry that climate exerts major control over soil carbon pools,” added Adrien Finzi, co-investigator and professor of biology at Boston University.
Averill, Finzi and Benjamin Turner, a scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, published their research this week in Nature.
Soil contains more carbon than both the atmosphere and vegetation combined, so predictions about future climate depend on a solid understanding of how carbon cycles between the land and air.
Plants remove carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis in the form of carbon dioxide. Eventually the plant dies, sheds leaves, or loses a branch or two, and that carbon is added to the soil. The carbon remains locked away in the soil until the remains of the plant decompose, when soil-dwelling microbes feast on the dead plant matter and other organic detritus. That releases carbon back into the air.
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  IMAGE: This Eastern Hemlock stands at Harvard Forest.
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One of the limits that both the plants and the soil-dwelling microbes share is the availability of nitrogen, an essential nutrient for all life. Most plants have a symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi, which help extract nitrogen and nutrients from the soil and make that nitrogen available for the plants to use. Recent studies have suggested that plants and their fungi compete with the soil microbes for the nitrogen available in the soil and that this competition reduces decomposition in the soil.
There are two major types of the symbiotic fungi, ecto- and ericoid mycorrhizal (EEM) fungi and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. EEM fungi produce nitrogen-degrading enzymes, which allows them to extract more nitrogen from the soil than the AM fungi extract.
Examining data from across the globe, Averill and his colleagues found that where plants partner with EEM fungi, the soil contains 70 percent more carbon per unit of nitrogen than in locales where AM fungi are the norm.
The EEM fungi allow the plants to compete with the microbes for available nitrogen, thus reducing the amount of decomposition and lowering the amount of carbon released back into the atmosphere.
“This study is showing that trees and decomposers are really connected via these mycorrhizal fungi, and you can’t make accurate predictions about future carbon cycling without thinking about how the two groups interact. We need to think of these systems holistically,” said Averill.
The researchers found that this difference in carbon storage was independent of and had a much greater effect than other factors, including the amount of plant growth, temperature and rainfall.
Averill is a student in the ecology, evolution and behavior graduate program in the lab of Christine Hawkes, associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology.
Additional contact: Lee Clippard, media relations, University of Texas at Austin, 512-232-0675, clippard@austin.utexas.edu
ROM = one smart cookie, not born yesterday. Well done!
So many times the discussion has got close my line of thinking yet never quite made the connection.
This time it has nearly everything, soil organic matter, nitrogen and atmospheric co2.
Here goes Pete’ theory of Global Warming.
We all know the shape of the Mauna Loa CO2 graph and how it rumbles along fairly level UNTIL the mid 1940’s. It picks up from that point and paints a sawtooth line, rising by ~4ppm then dropping back by 2pp every year – something seasonal is going on.
What happened in the 1940’s = WW2 ended and huge amounts of nitrate, previously made for and used in explosives was given to farmers. And the farmers (certainly in Europe) were vehemently encouraged to use it. They did.
As this article states, nitrate is the limiting nutrient in soil – it feeds the intended plants but also drives the soil bacteria into massive feeding frenzy. Their waste products are in two main parts, acids that dissolve the rock fraction of the soil supplying trace nutrients for the plants and also CO2.
In the case of a forest, all this is good because a forest has deep roots and also puts a canopy over the soil to catch the CO2. The canopy collects as much as possible before it can blow away. Several commentators here have mentioned the recorded fact that CO2 levels on a forest floor reach 600ppm, 500ppm half way up the trees and 400ppm at the very top. There’s the process in action.
Also, the soil bacteria feeding on the soil organic matter are VERY temperature sensitive and it seems a huge co-incidence that the leaves fall off as temperature drop. Low temps mean very little CO2 to catch.
Also on this point, we have the work of Murray Salby who has found a definite correspondence between temps and the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2.
Now enter the world’s farmers growing mostly annual crops – they have to because perennial crops do not guarantee the yield. But, the crop plants are still tiny when the temps have risen and the soil bacteria, pumped up with nitrogen fertiliser are going full tilt. In summer when the crops are active and ‘large’, they can keep up with soil bacteria output and actually suck more CO2 from the atmosphere, hence the CO2 graph dips during Northern hemisphere summertime. In autumn though, the crop effectively die and are harvested, again in high-ish temps while the bacteria are still working so, the CO2 graph picks up again.
Also, farmers plough and cultivate vast areas of the planet’s surface and always areas of high organic matter. This repeatedly exposes ancient buried organic matter to sunlight and oxygen, its got nothing else to do but become CO2. Again, forests had that angle covered. Whenever there is a bright sun, the trees shield the soil. There was an article here describing a forest (killed by beetles) where the temperature had risen by 1 deg C
I’ve lost the link but: a study near me (actually in SW Scotland) simply ploughed an ancient pasture field and left it with a few CO2 sensors dotted around. They left it untouched for 2 years and in both years it released 10 tons per acre of CO2.
Here is a study of some vegetated ground that released 3.4 tons per acre per year. Those figures are vast enough (dwarfing fossil fuel emissions) as it is before being multiplied (how many times) by the addition of nitrogen fertiliser.
As a grassland farmer and having tried to educate myself on AGW to explain changes on my farm, I suddenly saw exactly what is happening. Effectively the subsoil is coming to the surface. Myself, my neighbours, my father and all theirs, are slowly but surely desertifying our land – what else is a desert but a place of low soil organic matter?
Subsoil will be either very porous (sand/gravel) or impervious to water clay as I am or solid rock)
In either case, the effect on rainfall will be the same, it will pour off or drain through the ground much faster than if a lot of organic matter was there. You will know the effect even from keeping a pot-plant on your windowsill. Looking around England I see the effect everywhere. I see puddles and lakes that remain for months in cultivated field, I see light coloured and shiny soil behind ploughs (good organic soil should be almost black). I know that it is essential to use 4-wheel drive machinery on farms now and I wonder how my grandfather managed with horses and carts. They would be entirely unusable and endlessly mired on almost all of England’s modern-day farmland.
I also see rivers turn into raging torrents within an hour of rainfall starting and returning to normal within hours of rainfall stopping. The peak rainfall in my little river used to be 24 to 30 hours after the rain started – I know having watched it for 40 years.
As we have going on now in the UK, we hear of floods and supposedly record rainfall. As Paul Homewood has pointed out several times here on WUWT, the record rainfall amounts are basically an urban myth. I’ve been and got the data from the Met Office, I downloaded stuff from Wunderground; rainfall is almost unchanging. What is changing is the way the land handles that rainfall. The word ‘run-off’ has entered everyone’s vocabulary, it never used to be yet is the ‘norm’ now and universally accepted. This is typically called Flash Flooding and is typical of deserts is it not?
That explains the rising atmospheric CO2 and the apparent floods but also ‘rising’ temperatures and sea level. The organic matter that was previously in the soil retained huge amounts of water (2” of rainfall per foot depth). If the organic mater is not there, neither is the water and where is it? Surely back in the world’s ocean and explains the slow creep/rise in sea-level.
Also and as Willis endlessly points out, water controls the temperature. If the water is not there (in the soil), temperatures can vary more than they previously did. Is that not exactly what we are seeing. Summertime always seems to set new high temp records and winter-times set new low temperature records. What is going on in N America right now? Did (I think) Pamela Gray very recently mention her farmer boyfriend and how he’d noted that there were more excessively hot days and also excessively cold days for whatever crop he was growing?
So there we have it (my theory of AGW)
The CO2 is the symptom, not the cause of ‘global warming’ and it is frustrating (to me at least) how so many commentators here have been so close yet never made that final step. It all instinctively fits and once you know what to look for, flash floods, record (high and low) temperatures, water sitting in fields, light coloured soil in those fields, the changes in farming practices, the increase of tracked machinery on farms because organic matter held the soil structure together. (it didn’t turn to mud so easily and could support things that exert a high ground pressure (=horses and carts)).
Also, run the calculations yourself, that 10 tons per acre figure completely blows human fossil emissions right out of the park even before you put a double/triple/quadruple factor in for the effect of nitrogen fertiliser. The final thing that ‘did it’ for me was learning that the topsoils of the (Great) Plains were once 12 feet thick and are now 4” thick. Remember, that soil was bulldozed off Canada by the Laurentide ice sheet so the organic matter in it was ?? old.
Thats my piece, I’ll shut up now.
My fail, forgot the link (2.5MB pdf)
http://geography.kcl.ac.uk/micromet/Publications/AE_Crawford_CO2Baltimore.PDF
Interesting. I’ve seen one estimate that as much as 25% of total world biomass is fungi, so their impact on the rest of the ecosystem is substantial. Maybe even even more than cow farts :-).
I share bwanajohn’s concerns. I’d like to believe that these neglected carbon sources and sinks figure into the picture. In that connection, it would be good to have some mass estimates on fungal carbon input/output to throw into the carbon cycle mass balance. But more important, it seems to me, is the fact that there is this steady upward creep in atmospheric CO2, regardless of whether you think it has much effect on climate. Does the existence and weight of a fungal carbon component imply that the Keeling curve would be differently shaped, or have a different absolute level without that component?
Pete in Cumbria UK says at January 9, 2014 at 6:14 am:
Interesting idea.
I would add in that nitrate fertiliser ends up in the Oceans via that run-off. And that would surely boost marine algae. Whether that raises or lowers CO2 release, I don’t know. But it is another impact outside of the soil.
Pete in Cumbria UK says:
January 9, 2014 at 6:14 am
“So many times the discussion has got close my line of thinking yet never quite made the connection.
This time it has nearly everything, soil organic matter, nitrogen and atmospheric co2.”
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We are birds of a feather.
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“Also on this point, we have the work of Murray Salby who has found a definite correspondence between temps and the rate of rise of atmospheric CO2.”
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Salby’s work holds under scrutiny?
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“The final thing that ‘did it’ for me was learning that the topsoils of the (Great) Plains were once 12 feet thick and are now 4” thick.”
__________________________________
It isn’t unusual to drive across the Great Plains at certain times and see towering plumes of dust, visible from 50 miles. The source? A farmer in his tractor
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“Thats my piece, I’ll shut up now.”
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Please don’t. You’re just getting started.
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ROM says:
January 9, 2014 at 4:26 am
Great rant ROM………………………..
Well said and so true.
In the early days before Man, when trees appear so did the fungi – no problems. Now with Man ways and BS – global warming (ice all over) so must come out with other reasons like fungi. We are the problem – Stupid global warming quackers
From freshwater systems to fungi to claiming the oceans are at once warming and ‘acidifying’, to sea level rise that is not cooperating, to confusing weather with global warming/climate change/climate weirding, the AGW movement is facing a lot of things to ignore- certainly a great test of faith in any belief system.
ROM says:
January 9, 2014 at 4:26 am
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you nailed it.
It hadn’t occurred to me, until I read this post, how likely CAGW proponents are to sink their own boat. Leaving aside the value of this study, whatever it may be, its authors are just some among the many researchers trying to tie their findings to climate change, presumably to gain attention and grant dollars. But as they highlight new physical processes that they believe should be considered in the climate models, or that are not properly accounted for in the models, they call into question the models’ accuracy. Even if all these new processes are represented as positive forcings, they only drive the models’ projected temperatures higher at a time temperatures are flat. In any event, they’re no help to model proponents.
As everyone tries to get on the gravy train (to change the analogy) it eventually becomes overloaded and grinds to a halt. Not a new idea here at WUWT, but one that this study brought home to me.
Nick Stokes says:
“From a long line of missing things in climate models”
It’s missing for a
goodreason.There. Fixed that for ya.
GCM’s don’t determine non-water GHG gas concentrations; they are supplied as forcings (scenarios).
Then they have no ability for recursion on that parameter. Post time-step one, they become wrong even with respect to the scenario, and become worse with each iteration. And said scenarios are already far too dodgy on that point, given the fact that the carbon budget is nowhere near closed.
This would apply also to fungal respiration.
And thus to fungal sequestration, and (per this article) to fungi mediated sequestration. Of course, sequestration is only important to the climate when it provides you an opportunity to force other people to hamstring the economics of their power generation with it, right?
Happily, all of this doesn’t really doesn’t matter. Gaping holes in the ability to predict future CO2 partitioning could only matter to a climate model if that model accurately simulated the affect of CO2 on climate. To date, none do. Whew! Bullet dodged!
Isn’t it a wonderful attribute of “climate science” that it has sufficient immunity from the effects of cognitive dissonance that it can build a model that simultaneously assumes that global climate is primarily determined by the attributes of one component of the biosphere (people), and that the balance of the biosphere is yet ignorable?
ROM, that seems like fair comment to me. I think policymakers need to realise that they should not fund research which appears to be primarily looking to confirm new potential disasters. If you pay people to look for new problems, then guess what?… They will find them. I could come up with a plausible new problem for every day of the year.
And it’s not like there is a shortage of pre-existing problems.
The science was settled?
It seems as if every couple of months some new factor comes into play either unaccounted for, plays a bigger role or lesser role in our climate / carbon cycle. How on Earth (literally) can the IPCC project temperature for 2100 with reasonable accuracy? To date there is a yawning gap between observations and the vast majority of the CAGW models used by the IPCC.
The science is not settled, the debate is not over.
Let’s not forget that fungal mats are among the most massive lifeforms on the planet.
As long as the climate models are based on CO2’s negligible effect, pretending it is the major driver of climate, these bozos are going to be finding and pointing a finger at anything that has a metabolism.
ROM says:
January 9, 2014 at 4:26 am
“…”
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Please sir, I want some more.
I notice that they entirely ignore the oceans of the world, which contain 50 times the CO2 of the atmosphere. They conveniently pretend that CO2 is entirely driven by land and soil. How myopic of them. Simply a change in ocean temperatures can have enormous effects on atmospheric CO2, far beyond any fungal activity.
“Moore funding, please,” should be the title of the paper.
See my comment above, which pertains to many of the others’ comments also. We need to be realistic in addressing the CAGW critique of enthusiasts for carbon cycle sources and sinks. If fungal carbon, or oceanic carbon, or any other input has a massive effect on atmospheric CO2, how come it does not SEEM to affect the Keeling curve? Maybe these other sources/sinks ARE affecting it, but I don’t see an explanation as to how, why, or why not.
Does anyone know whether changes in the dominance between microbes and the fungi affects tree rings?
Here is Time spreading the gloomy news.
Here is Time spreading the brighter news. And so on over the coming years. New paper finds……..it’s worse than we thought! New paper finds……….a surprise to scientists. 🙂
\Nature is full of tricks. Maybe that’s why when co2 was well over 2,000ppm the Earth survived and even thrived for some odd reason. / sarc
Forgot the Time Mag links.
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1929071_1929070_1941227,00.html
http://science.time.com/2014/01/08/why-some-mushrooms-may-be-magic-for-climate-change/
Hard to stop feeling “So what?”
Not only are these fungus able to store up to 70 more carbon IN the soil but we also have the greening biosphere and arid areas becoming greener. This is the balance of nature, the Earth is active, plenty of capacity to soak it right up.
Here is another model, not used by the IPCC I presume (deadline issues maybe). 😉
site:http://www.ipcc.ch “A model-based constraint on CO2 fertilisation”
This paper is probably wrong, but base on the last couple of decades of observations on greening they might be on the right track.
Note that the relationship is symbiotic. There is a whole community of stuff down there, plants are like the tip of the iceberg. The plants benefit from better chemistry, protection from pathogens and increased transport of nutrients. The shrooms get carbohydrates and a place to live. Expect to find a complimentary increase in nitrogen fixing bacteria down there as well. As we recover from starvation levels of CO2, life responds with gusto. You could have just asked your local indoor medical marijuana grower 20 years ago. 1,400 ppm CO2 and Sunshine Mix #4 (inoculated with fungi) seems close to optimum. If we can get the Luddites out of the way, we are just about to eliminate world hunger by accident. Go to http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject.php pick a letter from the list and check out the astounding response rates. Returning CO2 levels to normal may just be the reason why Gaia invented us.
There is some very sloppy writing here. At least twice the text includes ‘the amount of carbon released back into the atmosphere.’ I don’t think ‘carbon’, is what is released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide is. The liberal media uses carbon in place of carbon dioxide to demonize CO2 all the time. Scientific pubs should be more accurate.