Root biomass contributes a significant proportion of total biomass and carbon storage in forest ecosystems. Deadwood (including dead roots) is an essential component of the ecosystem carbon (C) balance. Currently there are some shortcomings in the reporting of deadwood regarding the completeness and the level of detail. So far it is not possible to report about dead coarse roots since there is no existing data. Therefore, we a...

Coarse woody debris (CWD) is a major component of the ecosystem carbon (C) balance. The estimation of C storage in CWD is an important element of the German greenhouse gas (GHG) reporting of forests, which is mainly based on the German National Forest Inventory. The deadwood C stock is calculated based on deadwood volume and, according to deadwood density (DD) and carbon concentration (CC) for each decay class (DC). Yet, the d...

Summary The flow of carbon under sulfate‐reducing conditions within a benzene‐mineralizing enrichment culture was analysed using fully labelled [ 13 C 6 ]‐benzene. Over 180 days of incubation, 95% of added 13 C‐benzene was released as 13 C‐carbon dioxide. DNA extracted from cultures that had degraded different amounts of unlabelled or 13 C‐labelled benzene was centrifuged in CsCl density gradients to identify 13 C‐benzene‐assi...