Report on the impact of the soil microbiome in SOC-modelling: Deliverable 6.3 Towards climate-smart sustainable management of agricultural soils

Crop diversification is a potentially attractive agricultural practice for enhancing organic carbon (C) storage in soils. The aim of the EJP Soil project EnergyLink is to better understand the link between crop diversity and carbon sequestration by the soil microbiome across a pan-European pedo-climatic gradient. The central hypothesis is that greater crop diversity results in more efficient microbial use of C, thus enhancing the potential of soils to store C. Work package 6 on “Soil Organic Matter Modelling” aims to assess the relative impact of including the soil microbiome in SOC-models. This report describes the elaboration of task 6.3, in which the selected models have be adapted to include the soil microbiome and subsequently run with data from LTEs participating in EnergyLink.