We are broadly interested in the terrestrial carbon cycle and how the carbon balance of ecosystems is determined by the interplay of soil and plant processes with climate. We have recently focused on deep soil organic carbon in temperate ecosystems and what processes determine its stability and how those stabilization processes are affected by climate change. We will be setting up a deep soil warming experiment in an old field ecosystem in 2018. We are investigating how tree species affect soil carbon storage in mineral soils and exploring research in the arctic on the fate of new carbon and the vulnerability of old carbon to climate change.
Throughout our research, we use isotopes (both natural abundance and enriched levels) as tools: We enrich plants in 13C and 15N in order to trace the fate of their organic matter in soils, we use the δ13C and ∆14C (radiocarbon) of respired CO2 to partition ecosystem into plant and microbial sources, and we use radiocarbon to estimate the age of soil carbon and model soil carbon processes. Our lab is building a facility for labeling plants to be used in tracer studies.
