Plants and trees have long been known to extend their roots into the earth in search of nutrients and water. However, a new study has revealed that many plants develop a second, deeper layer of roots – often more than three feet underground – to access additional nourishment. This discovery, published in the journal Nature Communications, changes our understanding of how ecosystems respond to changing environmental conditions.

The research team, led by Mingzhen Lu from New York University’s Department of Environmental Studies, used data from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) to examine rooting depth. By digging deeper than traditional ecological studies – up to 6.5 feet below the surface – they detected additional root patterns in diverse climate zones and ecosystem types.

The scientists’ work focused on three key questions: How do plants acquire resources? What strategies do they employ to adapt to environmental change? And what are the implications for carbon storage?

Their findings were striking: nearly 20 percent of the studied ecosystems had roots that peaked twice across depth – a phenomenon called “bimodality.” In these cases, plants developed a second, deeper layer of roots, often aligning with nutrient-rich soil layers. This suggests that plants have been growing in previously unknown ways to exploit additional sustenance.

The study’s lead author, Mingzhen Lu, observes that the current understanding of roots is “literally too shallow.” By not looking deep enough, we may have overlooked a natural carbon storage mechanism deep underground. The research opens up new avenues for inquiry into how bimodal rooting patterns impact the dynamics of nutrient flow, water cycling, and long-term soil carbon stock.

As scientists and policymakers look to manage ecosystems in a rapidly changing climate, they must consider these overlooked deep soil layers. The study concludes that plants may already be naturally mitigating climate change more actively than we’ve realized – we just need to dig deeper to fully understand their potential.

The West Coast of the United States is no stranger to massive floods caused by atmospheric rivers. These powerful storms bring much-needed moisture to the region, but also pose a significant threat to communities and ecosystems. A new study has shed light on the hidden trigger behind these devastating events: wet soils that cannot absorb more water when a storm hits.

The research, published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, analyzed over 43,000 atmospheric river storms across 122 watersheds on the West Coast between 1980 and 2023. The findings reveal that flood peaks were 2-4.5 times higher on average when soils were already wet. This means that even weaker storms can generate major floods if their precipitation meets a saturated Earth.

Lead author Mariana Webb, completing her Ph.D. at DRI and the University of Nevada, Reno, explained that flooding from any event is not just a function of storm size and magnitude but also depends on what’s happening on the land surface. The study demonstrates the key role that pre-event soil moisture can have in moderating flood events.

Interestingly, flood magnitudes do not increase linearly as soil moisture increases. There’s a critical threshold of soil moisture wetness above which you start to see much larger flows. This research also untangled the environmental conditions of regions where soil moisture has the largest influence on flooding.

In arid places like California and southwestern Oregon, storms that hit when soils are already saturated are more likely to cause floods. In contrast, in lush Washington and the interior Cascades and Sierra Nevada regions, watersheds tend to have deeper soils and snowpack, leading to a higher water storage capacity. Although soil saturation can still play a role in driving flooding in these areas, accounting for soil moisture is less valuable for flood management because soils are consistently wet or insulated by snow.

The study highlights the importance of integrating land surface conditions into impact assessments for atmospheric rivers. Webb worked with DRI ecohydrologist Christine Albano to produce the research, building on Albano’s extensive expertise studying atmospheric rivers, their risks, and their impacts on the landscape.

While soil saturation is widely recognized as a key factor in determining flood risk, Mari’s work helps to quantify the point at which this level of saturation leads to large increases in flood risk across different areas along the West Coast. Advances in weather forecasting allow us to see atmospheric rivers coming toward the coast several days before they arrive. By combining atmospheric river forecast information with knowledge of how close the soil moisture is to critical saturation levels for a given watershed, we can further improve flood early warning systems.

Increased monitoring in watersheds identified as high-risk, including real-time soil moisture observations, could significantly enhance early warning systems and flood management as atmospheric rivers become more frequent and intense. By tailoring flood risk evaluations to a specific watershed’s physical characteristics and climate, the study could improve flood-risk predictions.

The Hidden Impact of Anoxic Pockets on Sandy Shores

Human activities have dramatically increased nitrogen inputs into coastal seas, leading to a significant amount of this human-derived nitrogen being removed by microorganisms in coastal sands through denitrification. However, research has shown that this process can also occur in oxygenated sands, and scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany, have now revealed how this happens.

The scientists used a method called microfluidic imaging to visualize the diverse and uneven distribution of microbes and the oxygen dynamics on extremely small scales. “Tens of thousands of microorganisms live on a single grain of sand,” explains Farooq Moin Jalaluddin from the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology. The researchers could show that some microbes consume more oxygen than is resupplied by the surrounding pore water, creating anoxic pockets on the surface of the sand grains.

These anoxic microenvironments have so far been invisible to conventional techniques but have a dramatic effect: “Our estimates based on model simulations show that anaerobic denitrification in these anoxic pockets can account for up to one-third of the total denitrification in oxygenated sands,” says Jalaluddin.

The researchers calculated how relevant this newly researched form of nitrogen removal is on a global scale and found that it could account for up to one-third of total nitrogen loss in silicate shelf sands. Consequently, this denitrification is a substantial sink for anthropogenic nitrogen entering the oceans.

In conclusion, the hidden impact of anoxic pockets on sandy shores has been revealed by scientists, highlighting the importance of these microenvironments in removing nitrogen from coastal seas and emphasizing the need to consider them when assessing the overall nitrogen budget of our planet.