New publication: No carbon saturation under extreme fertilizer application

According to the concept of carbon saturation, the ability of soils to accumulate stabilized organic carbon is limited. The concept and its application are very controversial. Therefore, we wanted to test this theory using long-term field experiments. Soil samples were taken from four long-term field experiments with different and sometimes very extreme amounts of organic fertilization. The carbon inputs were sometimes five times higher than in normal agricultural practice.

Even under these artificial conditions, the experiments did not show any pronounced saturation behavior. This suggests that carbon sequestration is mainly limited by the availability of carbon inputs from biomass.

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-024-07146-z