How much carbon can soils hold? | 9am PT, Tues Ap 21, 2026
Grigory Bronevetsky
 Modeling Talks |
How much carbon can soils hold? Katerina Georgiou, Oregon State University  Tues, April 21, 2026 | 9am PT Hi all, The presentation will be via Meet and all questions will be addressed there. If you cannot attend live, the event will be recorded and can be found afterward at More information on previous and future talks: https://sites.google.com/modelingtalks.org/entry/home Abstract: Managing soils to increase organic carbon presents a potential opportunity to mitigate and adapt to global change challenges, while providing numerous co-benefits and ecosystem services. However, soils differ widely in their potential for carbon gains and losses, and advancing knowledge of biophysical limits to carbon accumulation may aid in informing priority regions for management. There is thus increasing interest in assessing whether soils exhibit a maximum capacity for storing organic carbon (i.e., carbon saturation), especially as mineral-associated organic carbon given its presumed greater persistence and the finite nature of reactive minerals in soils. In this seminar, I will summarize my ongoing work on the limits, controls, and vulnerability of mineral-associated organic carbon, and review its representation in ecosystem- to global-scale soil carbon models. Bio: Katerina Georgiou is an Assistant Professor in Biological & Ecological Engineering at Oregon State University. Her research focuses on understanding and modeling how soil carbon cycling will respond to changes in climate and management, with particular interest in how pore-scale processes modulate emergent ecosystem-scale behavior. Prior to joining OSU, Katerina was a Lawrence Fellow and Staff Scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Lab. She received a Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering from UC Berkeley, working with the Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and was a USDA NIFA Postdoctoral Fellow in Earth System Science at Stanford University. |