Funding: GFZ Discovery Fellowship

Project period: 2024 - 2027

The Project CH₄Remove investigates the microbial potential to enhance the soil’s methane uptake and removal. Soils are the only biological methane sink, removing 30 to 40 Tg of this greenhouse gas per year. The soil methane uptake is facilitated by a group of microorganisms called methanotrophs. Lowering soil methane emissions or enhancing soil methane uptake (SMU) are promising ways to mitigate climate change. Microbiome engineering, which means the introduction of an microbial inoculum to natural microbial communities to tune specific microbial activities such as carbon sequestration, may be a promising approach to enhance SMU. Hence, this project explores if adding methanotrophs to soils can enhance SMU. Furthermore, we want to investigate the impact of climate change by examining how different climate change scenarios (temperature and precipitation) affect these incubations. Another aim is to scale up soil methane uptake using field data, flux chamber measurements, and remote sensing.

The project applies microbiological and molecular tools to investigate these questions. Upland and wetland soils will be incubated with the addition of microbes, and methane fluxes will be monitored throughout these incubations. In addition, changes in microbial community composition will be monitored by qPCR and marker gene sequencing. The project will yield new and exciting insights about methane uptake of soils and methanotroph’s potential to mitigate climate change.