Wow! This is much harder than I thought. Mostly, that’s because I thought I would have more time to myself during this trip to France. Turns out that I’m spending more time in the lab than I expected. That’s great because it is time doing actual science as opposed to the usual science management that I do back home. But, it doesn’t free up much time to do that reading that I committed myself to. I’m also not taking time to read or work in the evenings or weekend, the way I might normally do when as home.

That being said, here is my catch-up on reading for week two:

8. (June 13) Paustian et al. (2016) Climate-smart soils. Nature  532:49–57. doi:10.1038/nature17174. Key to determining how large is the potential for soil GHG mitigation is distinguishing between what is technically feasible and what might be achieved given economic, social and policy constraints. In addition, there is large uncertainty in measuring the potential as well as the permanence of that sequestration. It is not a panacea, but can be a win-win contributor because of positive knock-on effects for sustainable agriculture.

9. (June 13) Finn et al. (2017) Microbial energy and matter transformation in agricultural soils. Soil Biol Biochem. 111:176-192. doi:10.1016/j.soilbio.2017.04.010. Was really hoping this paper would focus more on energy. I am increasingly intrigued by the notion that carbon cycling in soil organic matter is just the proxy for energy fluxes through the heterotrophic decomposition system and that “stability” or resistance to decomposition can be expressed as an energy barrier. Instead, the paper did not cite great work by Henry Janzen on this topic, focused a lot on the physical environment and the microbial community structure. To each their own, I guess.