Trade-off between Pore-Throat Structure and Mineral Composition in Modulating the Stability of Soil Organic Carbon.

The preservation of soil organic carbon (OC) is an effective way to decelerate the emission of CO2 emission. However, the coregulation of pore structure and mineral composition in OC stabilization remains elusive. We employed the in situ nondestructive oxidation of OC by low-temperature ashing (LTA) combined with near edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS), high-resolution microtomography (µ-CT), field emission electron probe microanalysis (FE-EPMA) with C-free embedding, and novel Cosine similarity measurement to investigate the C retention in different aggregate fractions of contrasting soils. Pore structure and minerals contributed equally (ca. 50%) to OC accumulation in macroaggregates, while chemical protection played a leading role in C retention with 53.4%-59.2% of residual C associated with minerals in microaggregates. Phyllosilicates were discovered to be more prominent than Fe (hydr)oxides in C stabilization. The proportion of phyllosilicates-associated C (52.0%-61.9%) was higher than that bound with Fe (hydr)oxides (45.6%-55.3%) in all aggregate fractions tested. This study disentangled quantitatively for the first time a trade-off between physical and chemical protection of OC varying with aggregate size and the different contributions of minerals to OC preservation. Incorporating pore structure and mineral composition into C modeling would optimize the C models and improve the soil C content prediction.

Impacts of agricultural land use change on soil aggregate stability and physical protection of organic C.

Soil aggregate stability and soil organic carbon (SOC) physical sequestration is essential to regulation of anthropogenic climate change. However, relative knowledge remains elusive. The total SOC stock, aggregate stability, capacity of physically protected C, structure of macroaggregates and Al/Fe oxides under rice-wheat rotation (RW), rice-vegetable rotation (RV) and afforested land (AL) were analysed. We chose 1-2 mm macroaggregates for low-temperature ashing (LTA) treatment to mimic natural oxidation to assess the capacity of physically protected C. Using scanning electron microscopy, the N adsorption method, and energy dispersive spectroscopy, we explored the internal structure of macroaggregates under different land use types. All land use types could physically protect over 50% of SOC. AL showed the strongest capacity of C sequestration, followed by RW, which preserved 67.1% and 59.6% of SOC, respectively. After 5 h of LTA treatment, the amount of SOC removed from the macropores in cropland (RW and RV) was higher than that in AL. In micropores with further oxidation, AL and RW both lost only 5% of SOC. Fe oxides were more correlated with C dynamics than Al oxides. Free Fe oxides were associated with the easily oxidised organic matter. Soil aggregate stability significantly correlated with Al/Fe oxides (p < 0.05). The RW and AL had a greater soil aggregate stability than the RV owing to the relatively higher content of Al/Fe oxides. In conclusion, the conversion of RW to RV reduced the mechanical stability of soil aggregates and the capacity of C physical sequestration, while the conversion of RW to AL increased these two properties. Land use change affected C physical sequestration mainly via changes in surface area, pore development and the content of Fe oxides in macroaggregates.