Soil Biogeochemistry Lab ­­@ UC Merced

Ph.D. Candidate Kimber Moreland received a UC-Lab FEES fellowship for a two-year in residence fellowship at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). This highly competitive award will support Kimber on her dissertation research on “Climatic Controls of Subsoil Organic Carbon Dynamics” that is taking place at the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory. During her fellowship, Kimber will be co-mentored by Dr. Karis McFarlane at the Atmospheric, Earth and Energy Division and Center for Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (CAMS) at LLNL.

Read about our Women in Science and Technology group that we launched to support faculty members and students in STEM fields. Our new organization at UC Merced is working to close the gender gap by engaging, supporting and mentoring women in fields traditionally dominated by men.

The full article is available at this link .

Our team received one of the four 2016 recipients of the President’s Research Catalyst Awards for our proposed work on: “California Drought and Carbon Management for Agriculture,” $1.69 million, PI: Sam Ying (UC Riverside) and co-PIs  Asmeret Asefaw Berhe and Teamrat Ghezzehei (UC Merced), Kate Scow and Sanjai Parikh (UC Davis), Eoin Brodie, Peter Nico, Margaret Torn, Bill Riley (LBNL)

California agriculture, a backbone of the state’s economy, faces enormous challenges as access to a predictable water supply declines and becomes unpredictable. Soil quality or “soil health” is critical to how crops respond to climate variability. Vanguard research in the soil microbiome holds promise for understanding soil-carbon dynamics. In this project, collaborators bring their wealth of soil science knowledge and experience to examine how crops respond to drought using varying farming practices and irrigation methods.

“This award is a major recognition for the quality of soil science research we are doing at UC Merced, and it positions Professor Ghezzehei and myself to play even bigger roles in demonstrating the critical part soils play in food security and climate change adaptation in California and beyond,” Berhe said. She co-wrote a paper for the prestigious journal Science this spring talking about the role of soils in human security.

“The water in soil is critical to microbial community dynamics, carbon storage and plant productivity,” Ghezzehei said. “Improved understanding of the feedbacks between climate variability — including drought, El Niño and associated changes in precipitation and air temperature — and soil-water availability is essential for success and sustainability of agriculture and all terrestrial ecosystems. Specifically, as part of this work, we will study mechanisms of how changes in climate and water availability in agricultural systems affect soil aggregate dynamics and the carbon-sequestration potential of agricultural soils.”

Read the full story from UC Merced communications at this link

Details of the position are available at here

Erin’s firth paper was published in Biogeosciences. Among other things, this study shows that, in the Southern Sierra Nevada, annual rates of sediment export (for the time period between 2005 and 2011) varied from 0.4 to 177 kg/ha, while export of C in sediment was between 0.025 and 4.2 kg C/ha and export of N in sediment was between 0.001 and 0.04 kg N/ha. Sediment yield and composition showed high interannual variation. In our study catchments, erosion laterally mobilized OM-rich litter material and topsoil, some of which enters streams owing to the catchment topography where steep slopes border stream channels.The OM-rich nature of eroded sediment raises important questions about the fate of the eroded OM. If a large fraction of the soil organic matter (SOM) eroded from forest ecosystems is lost during transport or after deposition, the contribution of forest ecosystems to the erosion-induced C sink is likely to be small (compared to croplands and grasslands). Read more here.

This work was conducted as part of the Southern Sierra Critical Zone Observatory Project.

Asmeret had the pleasure to be a guest on Tom Willey’s radio program – Down on the Farm with Tom Willey on KFCF 88.1 FM in Fresno, CA. Listen to the whole interview below:

As Tom, the host, put it: “Soil is the living epidermis of the planet.” So begins Soil and Human Security in the 21st Century, an extraordinarily important article, written by a half-dozen soil scientists, which appeared in May 8th’s journal Science, the New York Times of scientific publications. By declaring 2015 International Year of Soils, the United Nations General Assembly hopes to make all peoples aware that management of six-inches of top soil underlies any civilization’s prosperity and survival. One author of that clarion call for soil stewardship, UC Merced soil biogeochemist Asmeret Asefaw Berhe, engages with “Down on the Farm”

In 2011, Asmeret was awarded the Hellman Family Foundation’s grant for early career scientists. Recently, the Hellman Family foundation featured a few of the past recipients, including Asmeret. Check this out (link)…