Root Causes: USU Scientist Explores Tools for Carbon Accounting

If you want to know what’s happening with carbon in the Earth’s atmosphere, start by looking under your feet. And as you dig deeper, pay attention to roots. That’s where the action is, says Utah State University professor Helga Van Miegroet.

“Methods for monitoring carbon above ground are easy — we refer to that as the ‘low hanging fruit’ of carbon accounting,” she says. “But more than three-fourths of carbon in the world’s forests is stored below ground and methods for below-ground monitoring are not as well developed.”

A soil scientist, silviculturist and biogeochemist with dual appointments in USU’s Department of Watershed Sciences and Department of Wildland Resources, Van Miegroet traveled to Europe this past academic year [2009-10] as part of a sabbatical leave to explore approaches by European Union scientists for monitoring, storing and accounting for carbon on forest lands.

“In response to commitments made through the Kyoto Protocol, the EU is supporting the intergovernmental European Cooperation in Science and Technology or ‘COST’ framework to better understand land use and climate changes and to develop reporting and measurement tools to comply with new environmental standards,” Van Miegroet says. “COST establishes networks of scientists around research themes called ‘actions’ to exchange expertise and focus on particular hot topics and urgent problems.”

During her European sabbatical, Van Miegroet served as a guest professor at Austria’s Universität fur BodenKultur (University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences) in Vienna and at Germany’s Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg and as a visiting scientist at Austria’s Bundesamt und Forschungszentrum für Wald (Federal Forest Research Institute). While there, she was invited to lend a hand to COST Action 639 “Greenhouse Gas Budget of Soils under Changing Climate and Land Use (BurnOut)” and COST Action FP0601 “Forest Management and the Water Cycle (FORMAN).”

“Among the challenges we explored was: How do you account for land use and climate changes and the resultant vegetation shifts, along with forestry disturbances such as timber harvesting, clear cutting, wildfires, floods and storms, when quantifying soil carbon storage?” Van Miegroet says. “What became obvious is that using what we know about above-ground storage to make inferences about below-ground may be misguided.”

What the scientists realized as they tried to develop models to determine what was happening with carbon storage in soils, is that they needed to know more about the vegetation’s roots, she says. “Roots may be an important source of soil organic carbon and the key to determining what’s happening to the soil following disturbances.”

Van Miegroet and European colleagues are pursuing a grant from the Austrian Research Council for a collaborative research project using findings from her soil carbon storage research in the T.W. Daniel Experimental Research Forest in Logan Canyon to better understand what’s happening to soil carbon in the treeline zone of the European Alps. Since her return to Utah, Van Miegroet has already hosted scientists from Europe and introduced them to the unique features of northern Utah’s aspen-conifer forests.

“What I find exciting is that the EU countries are willing to go beyond simply refining soil carbon concentration past the decimal point,” she says, “Instead, they’re willing to explore new science in environmental monitoring and modeling. Collaborations with EU scientists could really boost our knowledge of carbon storage and sequestration.”

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