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Similar composition but differential stability of mineral retained organic matter across four classes of clay minerals

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Abstract

Adsorption of dissolved organic compounds onto mineral surfaces is increasingly recognized as a significant, if not dominant, carbon stabilisation mechanism in many soils. By utilising carbon-13 enriched dissolved organic carbon (DOC) source materials in a repeated leaching-sorption-incubation study, we show here that the biochemical composition of mineral-retained organic matter (OM) is similar across four different classes of clay minerals but the quantity and stability of this OM is both a function of source material and clay mineralogy. Three to eight times as much carbon was retained on a mass basis when the same amount of DOC derived from eucalyptus versus wheat litter was applied, and the retained wheat-derived OM was up to 2.4 times more degradable than that of the eucalyptus source. For both litter types, carbon retention across the clay types was not significantly different; whereas, the stability of the retained OM was different but depended on which litter extract had been applied. The wheat-derived DOC was more stable when retained by allophane and oxides than by illite and smectite. Solid-state 13C NMR spectroscopic results indicated that despite large compositional differences in both source litter and resultant DOC, the composition of the mineral-retained OM was similar across clay classes with lignin-derived aromatic and carboxylic compounds dominating. Differences in the amount of carbon retained were related to differences in the proportions of aromatic, phenolic and carboxylic C in the DOC produced from the two litter sources. Differences in the stability across the clay classes were correlated with the abundance of metals and short-range ordered minerals. These results suggest that whenever reactive mineral surfaces and metals are present in a soil, a similar form of relatively unaltered litter derived OM can be adsorbed but that the longer term stability of sorbed OM, and thus in situ composition, will be a function of the mineralogy (reactivity) of the specific minerals involved in the binding process.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by a strategic appropriation grant from the CSIRO Sustainable Agriculture National Research Flagship. We would like to thank M Raven for XRD analysis, C Creamer, L Macdonald and M Farrell for thoughtful discussions during the development of this manuscript and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CSIRO Division of Land and Water, Urrbrae, SA, 5064, Australia

    Jonathan Sanderman, Todd Maddern & Jeffrey Baldock

  2. CSIRO Sustainable Agriculture National Research Flagship, PMB 2, Glen Osmond, SA, 5064, Australia

    Jonathan Sanderman & Jeffrey Baldock

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  1. Jonathan Sanderman
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Correspondence to Jonathan Sanderman.

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Sanderman, J., Maddern, T. & Baldock, J. Similar composition but differential stability of mineral retained organic matter across four classes of clay minerals. Biogeochemistry 121, 409–424 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-014-0009-8

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