Steven Hall
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Earth & Environmental Science
Soil organic matter, the carbon-rich material left from plants and microbes, shapes soil fertility, water quality and global climate. It does this by storing carbon and nutrients and releasing them as it decomposes.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
soil organic matter
soil carbon
nitrogen cycling
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Test whether variation in soil organic matter properties and cycling across U.S. ecosystems can be explained by three fundamental axes running from fast to slow biogeochemical rates, using samples and data from NEON sites.
- Measure the molecular composition, geochemistry and mineralogy of organic matter in NEON soils to connect what soil organic matter is made of with the minerals and climate around it.
- Quantify short- and long-term carbon and nitrogen process rates and microbial functional genes, which are genes that indicate what soil microbes can do, to test how these drive decomposition and nitrogen supply to plants.
- Combine existing continental datasets with new measurements to test a quantitative framework that predicts soil carbon and nitrogen cycling from local to continental scales.
More about the research
More than a century of research has not made it easy to predict where this material builds up or how fast it breaks down. Scientists still debate what it is made of and why it persists, since microbes can eventually decompose it over days to millennia. Many past studies looked at one soil type or one region, which leaves open whether their ideas hold across a whole continent.
Why it matters
Soil organic matter affects crop fertility, water quality and the amount of carbon held out of the atmosphere. A framework that predicts soil carbon and nitrogen cycling across many ecosystems could improve forecasts of these services at continental scale. Such forecasts could help land managers and climate modelers who rely on knowing how soils store and release carbon and supply nitrogen to plants.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Kathleen Treseder
University of California-Irvine, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether soil fungi and bacteria adapt to extreme warming more effectively when they interact with the natural microbial community, through field evolution experiments spanning thousands of generations.
Sydne Record
University of Maine, ME·Ecology & Evolution
Develop machine learning algorithms that automatically measure body traits of NEON beetle specimens from images, and test how well they work across different image types.
Serita Frey
University of New Hampshire, NH·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether decades of soil warming produce cycles of organic matter decay punctuated by shifts in the soil microbial community, continuing core measurements across Harvard Forest plots warmed 5 degrees Celsius for 13, 16 and 28 years.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
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