Dartmouth Researchers Help Unveil New Insights into Soil Carbon Dynamics and Environmental Change

Neukom Fellow '23 Sophie von Fromm led a study showing how soil carbon in a northern hardwood forest responds to environmental change over time and space. The research, published in the journal Global Change Biology, advances our understanding of how forests store and cycle carbon, a key process for climate regulation.

The study, "Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of Soil Carbon Cycling and Its Response to Environmental Change in a Northern Hardwood Forest," explores the complexities of how carbon is stored, transformed, and released from forest soils, and how these processes are affected by changing environmental conditions. The multidisciplinary team combined long-term field measurements, laboratory analyses, and computational modeling to track soil carbon dynamics over the past five decades at several sites in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, located in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, USA.

Key findings highlight that carbon in soil litter cycles much faster than carbon in mineral soils - on the scale of years versus centuries. While soil carbon appears to be stable at the watershed scale, the litter layer is recently losing carbon at the site scale, suggesting that it may serve as an early warning sign of environmental change. The work highlights the importance and challenges of considering temporal and spatial soil carbon dynamics in the context of climate change mitigation. The research, supported by the Neukom Institute, also highlights the vital role of advanced computational science in environmental research.

Read the full article here: doi.org/10.1111/gcb.70250