Soil Organic Matter Persistence as a Stochastic Process: Age and Transit Time Distributions of Carbon in Soils.

ABSTRACT: The question of why some types of organic matter are more persistent while others decompose quickly in soils has motivated a large amount of research in recent years. Persistence is commonly characterized as turnover or mean residence time of soil organic matter (SOM). However, turnover and residence times are ambiguous measures of persistence, because they could represent the concept of either age or transit time. To disambiguate these concepts and propose a metric to assess SOM persistence, we calculated age and transit time distributions for a wide range of soil organic carbon models. Furthermore, we show how age and transit time distributions can be obtained from a stochastic approach that takes a deterministic model of mass transfers among different pools and creates an equivalent sto

SUBMITTER: Sierra CA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6472657 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature