2017 ESA Annual Meeting (August 6 -- 11)

IGN 6-3 - Interfacing plant and soil in earth system models: Missing components and implications

Tuesday, August 8, 2017
C124, Oregon Convention Center
Qing Zhu, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, William Riley, Earth and Environmental Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA and Robert Grant, Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences Department, University of Alberta
Fertilization of terrestrial plants by elevated CO2 concentrations is an important component of Earth’s greenhouse gas budget and strongly affects climate change predictions. Substantial changes have been documented at the plant-soil interface (e.g., rhizosphere enzymatic activity and mycorrhizal fungi), which provide possible explanations to the observed plant and soil dynamics under elevated CO2 conditions. Unfortunately, representations of the rhizosphere and mycorrhizae are absent in current ESMs. To address this issue, we built a plant-soil interface model for integration in the ACME Land Model (ALM) to explain the observed changes of soil nitrogen dynamics at Oak Ridge and Duke FACE sites.