X-ray tomography to incorporate redox conditions into soil carbon turnover models

We suggest that X-ray tomography can be successfully employed to generate numerical values of a) total pore space, b) pore geometry, c) pore size distribution and d) pore connectivity at relevant pore scales. We propose that such a parameter set should allow us to predict the extent to which a given soil structure will yield anaerobic microsites, i.e. microbial microhabitats with unique metabolic characteristics. Performing this work for relatively large soil volumes (cm-scale) will generate information at a scale large enough to support the translation of process knowledge into pedon and landscape scale submodels