Soil's natural impact on greenhouse gas emissions

How biogeochemical processes in soil ecosystem affect the carbon cycle

Climate change and emission of greenhouse gas, such as CO2, is a legacy issue that our human society will fight for long term. Recently, president Obama is set to announce steeper cuts in carbon pollution from power plants, and require power plants to reduce carbon emissions by 32% from 2005 levels between now and 2030. However, to the other side, there are still lots of open questions regarding to how the natural reactions such as biogeochemical processes in soil ecosystem affect the carbon cycle and potentially influence the greenhouse gas emission, and how we can predict it.

Our project is set to investigate the largely unknown link between the soil carbon stability and the redox chemical reactions of iron, to improve our capability to model and predict the carbon cycles in natural ecosystems. This is a multi-institute collaborative project, for which UNR is playing a leading role. We have funded investigators at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Desert Research Institute, Lawrence Livermore National Lab and Oak Ridge National Lab, and unfunded collaborators from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and Carnegie Mellon University.

Learn more about Yu Yang