Priorities, opportunities, and challenges for integrating microorganisms into Earth system models for climate change prediction.

Climate change jeopardizes human health, global biodiversity, and sustainability of the biosphere. To make reliable predictions about climate change, scientists use Earth system models (ESMs) that integrate physical, chemical, and biological processes occurring on land, the oceans, and the atmosphere. Although critical for catalyzing coupled biogeochemical processes, microorganisms have traditionally been left out of ESMs.

The Coastal Carbon Library and Atlas: Open source soil data and tools supporting blue carbon research and policy.

Quantifying carbon fluxes into and out of coastal soils is critical to meeting greenhouse gas reduction and coastal resiliency goals. Numerous 'blue carbon' studies have generated, or benefitted from, synthetic datasets. However, the community those efforts inspired does not have a centralized, standardized database of disaggregated data used to estimate carbon stocks and fluxes.

Rapid plant trait evolution can alter coastal wetland resilience to sea level rise.

Rapid evolution remains a largely unrecognized factor in models that forecast the fate of ecosystems under scenarios of global change. In this work, we quantified the roles of heritable variation in plant traits and of trait evolution in explaining variability in forecasts of the state of coastal wetland ecosystems. A common garden study of genotypes of the dominant sedge , "resurrected" from time-stratified seed banks, revealed that heritable variation and evolution explained key ecosystem attributes such as the allocation and distribution of belowground biomass.

A moisture function of soil heterotrophic respiration that incorporates microscale processes.

Soil heterotrophic respiration (HR) is an important source of soil-to-atmosphere CO flux, but its response to changes in soil water content (θ) is poorly understood. Earth system models commonly use empirical moisture functions to describe the HR-θ relationship, introducing significant uncertainty in predicting CO flux from soils. Generalized, mechanistic models that address this uncertainty are thus urgently needed.