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Review
. 2020 Feb 17;15(1):2.
doi: 10.1186/s13021-020-0137-5.

Changing soil carbon: influencing factors, sequestration strategy and research direction

Shangqi Xu  1 , Chunlei Sheng  2 , Chunjie Tian  3
Affiliations
Review

Changing soil carbon: influencing factors, sequestration strategy and research direction

Shangqi Xu et al. Carbon Balance Manag. .

Abstract

Soil carbon (C) plays a critical role in the global C cycle and has a profound effect on climate change. To obtain an in-depth and comprehensive understanding of global soil C changes and better manage soil C, all meta-analysis results published during 2001-2019 relative to soil C were collected and synthesized. The effects of 33 influencing factors on soil C were analyzed, compared and classified into 5 grades according to their effects on soil C. The effects of different categories of influencing factors, including land use change (LUC), management and climate change, on soil C and the underlying mechanism were compared and discussed. We propose that natural ecosystems have the capacity to buffer soil C changes and that increasing C inputs is one of the best measures to sequester C. Furthermore, a comparison between the meta-analyses and previous studies related to soil C based on bibliometric analysis suggested that studies on wetland soil C, soil C budgets and the effects of pollution and pesticides on soil C should be strengthened in future research.

Keywords: Agricultural management; Carbon budgets; Climate change; Human activities; Land use change; Meta-analysis; Soil carbon; Wetland.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Flow chart of this study. The keywords included Keywords-Author, Keywords-Plus, and Phrases-Title, which were obtained using Thomson Data Analyzer
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Changes in soil C due to the effects of each factor. The circles and error bars represent the means and 95% confidence intervals; the numbers next to the Y axes indicate the number of observations and studies. The results are significant at p < 0.05 (*), p < 0.01 (**), and p < 0.001 (***)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Flow chart of the classification of each influencing factor. The changes in soil C were examined with a single sample t-test, and a significance level of 0.05 was used. Furthermore, “n” is the number of collected meta-analysis results. The numbers followed by “Yes” or “No” are the number of factors that met or did not meet the classification criteria
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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