NWO NWA - Climate proof soils by steering soil and residue microbiomes

Global improvement of soil carbon sequestration has the highest priority on the environmental research agenda, and microbial activities hold the key to global climate mitigation strategies (Amelung et al., 2020). However, there are crucial unanswered questions with respect to the contribution of microbial biomass to soil carbon and how to keep microbes actively contributing to the stable soil carbon pool year-round. We also do not yet know which management practices are best suited for enhancing microbial carbon use efficiency and microbial contributions to soil carbon storage. We further lack the knowledge required to control undesired emissions of GHG when using more easily degradable organic amendments. Nitrogen cycle microbiology underlies the emission of N2O from soils, and recent breakthroughs have discovered novel organisms and pathways driving these processes (Norton & Ouyang, 2019; Stein, 2020). These new insights pose new challenges as well as opportunities for using plants to control nitrification (and subsequent N2O emissions) in soils. ClipsMicro will tackle many of these questions by focussing on the case on arable sandy soils in the Netherlands. Such soils have a large potentially to become more climate change friendly. By tackling their low organic carbon stabilising capacity and the associated risks of nutrient leaching and GHG emissions upon mineral and organic amendments, ClipsMicro seeks to address all the major topics of this call.