Brandon Sloan

1 Introduction Soils constitute a key global carbon stock underpinning ecosystem health and agricultural system productivity. Soil organic carbon (SOC) response to global change remains persistently uncertain despite improved understanding of other parts of the carbon cycle (Varney et al. 2022). Such predictions are challenging because warming affects both plant productivity (i.e., carbon inputs to the soil) and turnover of existing soil carbon (Bradford et al.

Abstract Breeding or engineering crops to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) storage is a potential route to land-based carbon dioxide removal on working agricultural lands. However, due to limited observational datasets plus shifting paradigms of SOC stabilization, there is a lack of understanding of which plant traits to target for SOC enhancement or the ultimate sequestration potential of such measures.