WZW - Lehrstuhl für Bodenkunde

At the Chair of Soil Science we work on the general characterisation of soil organic matter and the identification and extraction of functional soil organic matter pools that are important for long term stabilisation of carbon in soils and at the same time are responsible for the formation of biogeochemical interfaces in aggregated soils. We use state-of-the-art techniques of SOM characterization by combining solid-state 13C NMR spectroscopy to analyse bulk SOM composition with chemolytic techniques and GC-MS for the analysis of major SOM compounds relevant for the soil C cycle, especially polysaccharides, lignin and cutin/suberin. Our results show that SOM structural chemical as well as spatial variability has to be considered in order to understand the sensitivity of SOM pools to degradation. For this we use nano-scale secondary ion mass spectrometry (NanoSIMS), allowing the simultaneous analysis of up to seven ion species with high sensitivity and resolution. It is an unprecedented tool for the analysis of biogeochemical processes and properties of soils, as it enables us to investigate the elemental and isotopic composition of soils at the submicron scale.

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