Degraded Land Restoration in Reinstating CH(4) Sink

Methane (CH(4)), a potent greenhouse gas, contributes about one third to the global green house gas emissions. CH(4)-assimilating microbes (mostly methanotrophs) in upland soils play very crucial role in mitigating the CH(4) release into the atmosphere. Agricultural, environmental, and climatic shifts can alter CH(4) sink profiles of soils, likely through shifts in CH(4)-assimilating microbial community structure and function. Landuse change, as forest and grassland ecosystems altered to agro-ecosystems, has already attenuated the soil CH(4) sink potential, and are expected to be continued in the future. We hypothesized that variations in CH(4) uptake rates in soils under different landuse practices could be an indicative of alterations in the abundance and/or type of methanotrophic communities in such soils. However, only a few studies have addressed to number and methanotrophs diversity and their correlation with the CH(4) sink potential in soils of rehabilitated/restored lands. We focus on landuse practices that can potentially mitigate CH(4) gas emissions, the most prominent of which are improved cropland, grazing land management, use of bio-fertilizers, and restoration of degraded lands. In this perspective paper, it is proposed that restoration of degraded lands can contribute considerably to improved soil CH(4) sink strength by retrieving/conserving abundance and assortment of efficient methanotrophic communities. We believe that this report can assist in identifying future experimental directions to the relationships between landuse changes, methane-assimilating microbial communities and soil CH(4) sinks. The exploitation of microbial communities other than methanotrophs can contribute significantly to the global CH(4) sink potential and can add value in mitigating the CH(4) problems.