Editors’ Highlights are summaries of recent papers by AGU’s journal editors.
Source: Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences
The landscape takes up carbon (C) from the atmosphere and stores it in soils, mitigating atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and the impacts of climate change. Soil biogeochemistry models are the most widely used tools for predicting soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks, particularly in understudied regions that lack comprehensive observations. However, these models were developed based on the dominant processes controlling SOC in North Temperate systems and informed by their data.
von Fromm et al. [2026] test model “transferability” (i.e., the ability to apply the model across sites or regions) to Sub-Saharan Africa, evaluating how three commonly used soil biogeochemistry models predict SOC compare to observations. The authors find that the three models perform poorly even when parameterized with local observations, suggesting that model structure is missing important processes. Upon further evaluation, the authors attribute poor model performance to an overemphasis on net primary productivity and inadequate representation of organo-mineral interactions and exchangeable calcium as controls on SOC.
While this paper’s subject is Sub-Saharan Africa, it begs the question of model transferability to other under-studied regions, either due to lack of observational data or explicit model evaluation such as is presented in this paper. Soil organic carbon sequestration is thought to be one of the largest stocks of stored carbon in the biosphere, so quantifying current soil elemental budgets and predicting future changes requires models to perform well.
Citation: von Fromm, S. F., Rocci, K. S., Anuo, C. O., Asabere, S. B., Kanyiri, J., Kengdo, S. K., et al. (2026). Evaluating soil carbon models for sub-Saharan Africa: Revealing knowledge gaps in subtropical and tropical soil biogeochemistry. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, 131, e2026JG009726. https://doi.org/10.1029/2026JG009726
—Ceara Talbot, Associate Editor, JGR: Biogeosciences
Text © 2026. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0
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