Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

The attachment on this page contains the meeting minutes alongw ith all NE1938 annual report information for this year.

This year was the second actual year of the study. Our research plans focused on activities in the late spring, summer, and fall. Unfortunately, these plans have been severely hindered by the Covid-19 pandemic and the Omicron and Delta variants. Thus, our accomplishments have been minimal so far. In 2021 we published our work with the Mn IRIS: Rabenhorst, M.C., P.J. Drohan, J.M. Galbraith, C. Moorberg, L. Spokas, M.H. Stolt, J.A. Thompson, J. Turk, B.L. Vasilas, and K.L. Vaughan. 2021. Manganese-coated IRIS to document reducing soil conditions. Soil Science of America Journal. doi.org/10.1002/saj2.20301

Short-term Outcomes: This is essentially the 2nd year of this study, although some of the decomposition data has been recorded our overall carbon budget is incomplete. Our hope is by next year to have a complete set of decomposition data. We are still measuring inputs and will need to measure fluxes after that.

Outputs: Our overall goals are to understand of the role depressional wetlands play in control and emissions of greenhouse gases and to understand the effect of increasing temperatures on C stocks and fluxes in wetlands.
Activities: (See above from annual project meeting notes on planned activities for 2022)

Milestones: For 2022, our plans are 1) to complete site selection and site instrumentation; 2) continue temperature and hydrology monitoring; 3) complete sampling where needed; 4) measure carbon inputs from litter traps and deadfall plots; 5) deploy ingrowth cores to measure root inputs, 6) collected decomposition sticks and analyze; 7) analyze tea bag and leaf litter decomposition data; and 8) continue examine profile darkness data to complete the manuscript.

Impacts: This is essentially the 2nd year of the project and thus we have minimal results to report that would be considered an “impact”. We published our manuscript on the effectiveness of Mn IRIS to identify reducing conditions in soils. We found that Mn IRIS were much more effective than Fe IRIS in identifying reducing conditions in the early (colder) growing season. We propose that the National Technical Committee for Hydric Soils (NTCHS) consider accepting Mn IRIS for identifying reducing conditions when soil temperatures are between 5 and 11 degrees C.

Publications: In 2021 we published our work with the Mn IRIS (see above). WE plan on continuing to develop a manuscript linking profile darkness index to hydrology and potentially carbon stocks.