Open Access Publication of the Month – Xiaolei Sun (IBG-3) et al.
11 January 2024
To encourage us all to broaden our horizons, each month the Central Library selects one open access publication from the JuSER publications portal to be featured in the newsletter of Forschungszentrum Jülich.
In the open access publication of the month for January, Xiaolei Sun, Prof. Dr. Wulf Amelung, Prof. Dr. Erwin Klumpp, and Prof. Dr. Roland Bol from the Institute of Bio- and Geosciences – Agrosphere (IBG-3) investigate the biological cycling of soil phosphorus (P) in response to variations in fog frequency and rare rainfall events in the Atacama Desert. In the paper, they explain to what extent these two different water resources define the pedogenic threshold of biological P cycling.
Extreme dryness is having a limiting effect on life in many ecosystems on Earth, and the occurrence of reduced or even absent rainfall is predicted to increase in several regions due to climate change. The Atacama Desert is the driest place on Earth, with almost zero annual rainfall in its inner core zone. It is commonly used in many studies as an analogical model of Mars. However, some organisms can survive even in extremely dry environments, such as the hyper-arid Atacama Desert. Non-rainfall components, such as fog, may replace the lack of rainfall to sustain life in the desert. Revealing how soil functions, such as biogeochemical P cycling, are able to adapt to extreme water scarcity might provide insights that can help to address the ecological challenge of global desertification and where the boundary lies in terms of where “life” can still exist.
In their paper, the authors utilized a unique phosphate oxygen isotope approach to provide soil evidence indicating that fog predominantly sustains biological P cycling in the Atacama Desert, regulating microbial P cycling within a 10 km range from the coast. However, even beyond this distance, rare occasional rainfall events enable microbial P cycling. The studies also highlighted that the sporadic presence of plants does not significantly enhance P cycling in hyper-arid desert soils.
The open access publication entitled “Fog controls biological cycling of soil phosphorus in the Coastal Cordillera of the Atacama Desert” was published in the journal Global Change Biology.
JuSER publications portal – Fog controls biological cycling of soil phosphorus in the Coastal Cordillera of the Atacama Desert
Internet – Institute of Bio- and Geosciences – Agrosphere (IBG-3)