The deep soil carbon consequences of the conversion to perennial agriculture

We will investigate the potential that agricultural practices have to increase deep (30-100cm) soil carbon (C) stocks, while also improving mechanistic understanding of the processes that determine soil organic matter (SOM) persistence.

Specifically, we will determine how agricultural paradigms with perennial crops (PC), supporting deep rhizospheres, can provide a means to both store C and maintain fertility.

We will test fundamental soil science theory, and optimise the contradictive ecosystem services of mitigating climate change by storing C while maintaining soil fertility.

We hypothesize that 1 conversion to PC systems with deep rhizospheres will increase SOM contents (via the microbial carbon pump), increase SOM retention time (increasing persistence), and reduce the nutrient content (N and P) locked in SOM, 2 belowground root input in PC systems will trigger a rhizosphere priming effect (RPE), resulting in recovery of nutrients (N and P) from SOM throughout the profile (