Temperature, moisture and freeze-thaw controls on CO production in soil incubations from northern peatlands.

Peat accumulation in high latitude wetlands represents a natural long-term carbon sink, resulting from the cumulative excess of growing season net ecosystem production over non-growing season (NGS) net mineralization in soils. With high latitudes experiencing warming at a faster pace than the global average, especially during the NGS, a major concern is that enhanced mineralization of soil organic carbon will steadily increase CO emissions from northern peatlands. In this study, we conducted laboratory incubations with soils from boreal and temperate peatlands across Canada.

Potential carbon loss associated with post-settlement wetland conversion in southern Ontario, Canada.

Background: Natural wetlands can mitigate ongoing increases in atmospheric carbon by storing any net balance of organic carbon (peat) between plant production (carbon uptake) and microbial decomposition (carbon release). Efforts are ongoing to quantify peat carbon stored in global wetlands, with considerable focus given to boreal/subarctic peatlands and tropical peat swamps. Many wetlands in temperate latitudes have been transformed to anthropogenic landscapes, making it difficult to investigate their natural/historic carbon balance.

Variations in bacterial and archaeal communities along depth profiles of Alaskan soil cores.

Understating the microbial communities and ecological processes that influence their structure in permafrost soils is crucial for predicting the consequences of climate change. In this study we investigated the bacterial and archaeal communities along depth profiles of four soil cores collected across Alaska. The bacterial and archaeal diversity (amplicon sequencing) overall decreased along the soil depth but the depth-wise pattern of their abundances (qPCR) varied by sites.