How biogeochemistry shapes the carbon cycle: A brown food web perspective

The microbes, invertebrates, and plants that make up soil food webs each have a recipe of 25 or so chemical elements, each with a unique geography. Life’s recipe and the map of its elemental ingredients combine to form a powerful ecological toolkit. I consider one such combination of recipe and map. The evolution of life has resulted in an astonishing and useful fact: sodium is mostly useless to plants but vital to plant consumers. Sodium’s availability increases as one moves toward the coast, toward clay soils, toward hurricane tracks, and toward salted roadsides. I develop the many implications of sodium’s recipe and geography, including why termite damage is common on coastal plains, why carbon storage increases inland, and why sweat bees are such a nuisance in the Nebraska Sandhills and the Peruvian Amazon.