WSU Loam Collab

Loam Bio August 2

Transcript

00:00So at Loam we do a range of studies across laboratory work, field trialling work and

00:08we work with the best scientists we can.

00:10So in this case we collaborated with Ulema Carrillo to get access to specific expertise

00:16and equipment so that we could look at the carbon isotopes and trace them through the

00:21plant and into the soil.

00:24I'm a soil ecologist by training, I'm also a biogeochemist.

00:28I like to understand how plants and microbes and soil work together to produce the most

00:34complex substance on earth which is soil carbon.

00:38So soil carbon being the greatest storage of carbon on earth, it's really important

00:43to understand how it is built and carbon is a complex continuum of materials that is always

00:51being added to and is always losing materials.

00:55So understanding the ecological interactions that lead to building carbon or losing carbon

01:04and how they balance together, that is my main motivation for a lot of my research.

01:11What we did was we grew plants in growth chambers and we inoculated the plants with individual

01:16fungal isolates and then we grew those plants for four months and continuously labelled

01:23the plants with 13C CO2 labelling.

01:28And with wheat plants we waited to see how the fungi were helping the plant fix carbon

01:36or not and bring it from the atmosphere to the soil and so then after the plants grew

01:41when this happened we used stable isotope approaches to be able to understand the origin

01:47of the carbon and then we also combined that with a lot of approaches to assess the different

01:52pools that carbon can be stored in.

01:55And we also were very interested in which were the characteristics, and we measured

01:59a lot of them, that these fungi had that could be explaining our observations for the soil

02:07carbon pools and its dynamics.

02:10As a fungal ecologist I found it really interesting how different these fungal isolates were from

02:15each other.

02:17They grew really differently, even on a petri dish, some of them grew quickly, some of them

02:22grew slowly, and then when we added them to soil they had different ways in which they

02:27interacted with the plants and they had different ways in which they interacted with the soil

02:31itself.

02:32So ultimately soil carbon drives soil health.

02:36If you're increasing soil carbon you're increasing the potential of the soil to hold water, to

02:41retain nutrients, to make those nutrients available to plants and ultimately to increase

02:46crop productivity.

02:47So an exciting result from this study was seeing up to 9.4% higher soil carbon and what's

02:54most interesting is that there were 20% more resistant carbon.

02:59So that means that as carbon's increased it's more stable to being lost over time.