Post-doctoral position on modeling the priming effect for agricultural Europe

Your work will fit in WP4 ‘Develop in-situ tools for observation and monitoring of soil health’ led by Stockholm University, where your role is to provide estimates of soil carbon turnover under different land management strategies using the PrimeSCale model. 

Many agricultural practices aimed at increasing soil C stocks rely on increased root presence via inclusion of perennial crops, deeper rooting crop species or on residue return to the soil. The rhizosphere priming effect may decrease the efficiency of C storage for some of these practices. Estimates of the contribution of the priming effect to break-down of soil organic matter need to take into account a variety of driving factors, including the amount of soil carbon present, the intensity of plant (root) activity and the location of the plant roots and soil carbon in the soil profile. The PrimeSCale model has been developed to provide depth explicit, broad spatial scale estimates of priming induced soil respiration using observation based data products for the northern permafrost area (Keuper, Wild et al. 2020). You will further develop the PrimeSCale model for agricultural systems by mobilizing existing datasets as well as ecological and agronomic expertise from project partners.

You will be in charge of:

1. Developing the PrimeSCale model to fit agricultural soils; 
2. Evaluating to what extent the priming effect contributes to loss of soil carbon from European agricultural soils under different current and future management practices; 
3. Writing up findings both for EU-reporting as well as scientific publication;
4. Collaborating with international consortium partners on application of model outcomes in AI solutions for better soil health;
5. Organising meeting(s) with project partners and presenting your findings at international symposia.

Supervision: Frida Keuper (INRAE Laon), Project partners: Birgit Wild, Gustaf Hugelius (Stockholm university),  Gwenaëlle Lashermes and Hugues Clivot (INRAE Reims) and Bernhard Ahrens (Max Planck Institute).