Soils and Climate Change Beyond Carbon Sequestration: A Decade of NIFA's Agriculture and Food Research Initiative Competitively Funded Research.

In 2003, NIFA (then CSREES) introduced a cross-cutting priority in global change for the CSREES’s National Research Initiative program. This inspired many projects connecting climate and soil science in the Soil Processes section of the NRI. Since then, CSREES became NIFA (National Institute for Food and Agriculture), the NRI changed to the Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI), and the Soil Processes program has combined with other topics as the Renewable Energy Natural Resources and Environment section of the AFRI Foundational program. In 2004, climate change began to be part of more focused programs in partnership with other agencies such as NASA, EPA, and DOE, consistently addressing carbon cycle science, but sometimes also emphasizing land use and land cover change, invasive species, and ecosystem services The 2008 Farm Bill and the change from NRI to AFRI led to a new challenge area within AFRI on Climate Variability and Change in 2010 and additional partnerships began with NSF on Earth System Modeling and Water Sustainability and Climate. Throughout all of these varied programs and issues related to climate change, the strong importance to soils became more and more clear. Soils are at the core of terrestrial (including inland rivers and water bodies) greenhouse gas fluxes and also influence the highly variable and uncertain fluxes in coastal waters. This paper will present some of the outcomes of NRI/AFRI funded research on soils and climate change and discuss some emerging issues as well as some of the less obvious connections between climate change and soils.