Research in the Waring Lab
All research in the Waring Lab is aimed at improving our understanding of the terrestrial carbon cycle and its feedbacks to global change. Under this umbrella, our work is concentrated in three major areas.
Climate change mitigation via enhanced rock weathering
Funding: The Carbon Community, Eurofins Foundation, Grantham Foundation, NERC
Enhanced rock weathering is a technique to accelerate the natural dissolution of silicate minerals, a chemical reaction which transforms atmospheric carbon dioxide into dissolved inorganic carbon in soil pore water. This inorganic carbon will ultimately be transported to the ocean and sequestered there for thousands of years, yet it may also be converted back into CO2 on its soil-to-sea journey. Our lab is exploring controls on silicate weathering rates in soils and the fate of these weathering products, as well as quantifying feedbacks to the organic carbon cycle - which will ultimately determine the overall climate change mitigation potential of this technique.
Image: lysimeters at our field site in Wales, where we extract soil pore water to assess rock weathering rates.
Manipulating soil microbiomes to enhance ecological restoration and agricultural outcomes
Funding: The Michael Uren Foundation
Plant function depends upon an enormously complex community of bacteria, and fungi and viruses that live in soil. Yet when managing ecosystems to capture carbon or to produce crops, we frequently ignore the soil microbiome, which has often experienced a significant degree of disruption due to land use change or agricultural practice. We are exploring ways to optimise soil microbiomes in multiple environmental settings, accelerating ecological restoration and sustainably intensifying crop production.
Image: mixing microbial inocula for application to wheat fields
Carbon cycling in land ecosystems
Soils contain more carbon than all terrestrial plants and the atmosphere combined. Some of this carbon can be retained belowground for centuries. We investigate controls on the formation of persistent, long-lived soil carbon, and seek to understand how the composition of decomposer microbial communities affects carbon exchange between soils and the atmosphere. We also research the links between plant functional traits and soil carbon cycling.
Lab photos
