The Soil CORE lab

RESEARCH FOCUS

Our goal is to better understand soil organic matter vulnerability in response to environmental change. To do this we need both a better understanding of SOM controls and how those controls are modified by climate and management changes.

AREAS OF INTEREST

SOM vulnerability to environmental change

Environmental changes like changes in climate or management are likely to influence SOM amount and vulnerability. Understanding how these changes interact and impact plant, microbial, and mineral controls of SOM is important for understanding how SOM will function in the future.

Relevant publications: Rocci et al., 2022; Rocci et al., 2023; Rocci et al., 2023

Data-model integration

Empirical data and process-based models are two tools we have to understand SOM cycling. Data provides ground truthing for models and models can test theory and predict over space and time in ways data cannot. As such, uniting these tools to better understand soil biogeochemistry and how it may change is a fruitful research direction.

Relevant publications: Rocci et al., 2025

Synthesizing soil biogeochemistry

Everyday we are increasing our understanding of soil biogeochemistry but this data can get overwhelming if we can't make sense of it. As such, we focus on sythesizing available data and modeling tools to help contextualize novel findings and determine underexplored areas.

Relevant publications: Rocci et al., 2024; Rocci et al., 2024; Rocci et al., 2021

CURRENT PROJECTS

Quantifying deep soil and saprolite carbon

There is more carbon stored in soils than in plants and the atmosphere, combined. However, deep soil often gets neglected, as it is harder to access and has lower carbon concentrations. However, deep soils, and also saprolite, weakly weathered bedrock, are extensive and can thus hold large carbon stocks. This work aims to better quantify deep soil and saprolite carbon. Having this baseline is important for determining global carbon cycling, evaluating process-based models, and understanding responses to climate change.

Project partners: Asmeret Asefaw Berhe (UC Merced), Teamrat Ghezzehei (US Merced), Ben Sulman, (ORNL)
Image: Soil profile in Fort Collins, CO.

Investigating the fidelity of interactive global change effects on soil biogeochemistry in process-based models

Global changes such as elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and warming are not occurring in isolation. It has been assumed that if process-based models represent each of these global changes faithfully, they will accurately represent their interactive effects as well. However, this assumption has rarely been tested with empirical data from an interactive global change experiment. We are harnessing data from the TeRaCON (Temperature, Rainfall, CO2, and N) experiment to determine whether the Community Land Model with two different underlying soil models can faithfully represent interactive effects of elevated CO2 and warming on land carbon storage.

Project partners: Peter Reich (UofM), Will Wieder (CU), TeRaCON researchers
Image from: https://cedarcreek.umn.edu/research/experiments/e141

Integrating fungal trait data into microbially-explicit soil biogeochemical models

We have a wealth of soil fungal trait data in numerous databases but struggle to apply these to soil biogeochemical models due to scale mismatches, lack of direct translation between traits and model parameters, and difference in model parametrizations and structures. Working with a team of microbial ecologists and biogeochemical modelers, we are assessing the ability to use fungal trait data in two different soil biogeochemical models (MIMICS and MycoCORPSE) and assessing how empirical variability in fungal traits translates to variability in soil carbon cycling in models. This work will determine what additional data could be useful for models, what model structures could better incorporate empirical data, and how important empirical variation in fungal traits is for ecosystem functions.

Project partners: MicrobeNet^Net partcipants
Image: Fungi in an NH forest.