What is it about?
Soil carbon storage is an important function of terrestrial ecosystems. Soil contains more carbon than plants and the atmosphere combined. Understanding what maintains the soil carbon pool is important to understand the current distribution of carbon on Earth, and how it will respond to environmental change. While much research has been done on how plants, free-living microbial decomposers, and soil minerals affect this pool of carbon, it is recently coming to light that mycorrhizal fungi—symbiotic fungi that associate with roots of almost all living plants—may play an important role in maintaining this pool as well. Measurements of plant carbon allocation to mycorrhizal fungi have been estimated to be 5-20% of total plant carbon uptake, and in some ecosystems the biomass of mycorrhizal fungi can be comparable to the biomass of fine roots
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Why is it important?
how different aspects of mycorrhizal fungi may alter soil carbon decomposition and storage. Evidence is presented for arbuscular and ectomycorrhizal fungi separately as they are phylogenetically distinct and often function in very different ways.
Perspectives
It is possible that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi may be outcompeting free-living decomposers for either water or nutrients in some systems as well, however to date there is no demonstration of this, and it seems that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi may more often increase, rather than decrease rates of decomposition by free-living microbial decomposers
Balakrishnan Natarajan
Tamil Nadu Agricultural University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Effects of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus Rhizoglomus intraradices on active and passive pools of carbon in long-term soil fertility gradients of maize based cropping system, Archives of Agronomy and Soil Science, August 2018, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/03650340.2018.1512100.
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