Carbon can persist in the environment for a few years to millennia, depending on the mechanisms that stabilise it. Persistence is increasingly understood not as an intrinsic property of a particular molecular makeup, but as an emerging quality reflective of the physical, mineralogical, microbial and environmental context in which carbon resides. Resolving these controls across the diversity of carbon pools is fundamental to predicting how ecosystem carbon stocks will respond to climate and land-use change over time.

This session focuses on the processes that determine the durability of carbon across terrestrial systems. We welcome contributions on the stabilisation of soil organic carbon, including the divergent turnover of mineral-associated (MAOM) and particulate (POM) organic matter and the roles of mineral surfaces, aggregate occlusion and microbial processing; the long-term stability of pyrogenic and biochar carbon; the fate of inorganic carbon generated by silicate weathering, including dissolved inorganic carbon and pedogenic carbonate; and the redox- and moisture-controlled preservation of carbon in peatlands and wetlands, where the balance of aerobic and anaerobic decomposition affects carbon accumulation and loss.

We invite studies that utilise field observation, manipulative experiments, isotopic and radiocarbon tracing, spectroscopy, modelling, or novel approaches to illuminate the timescales of carbon persistence and its vulnerability to disturbance. Insights that unify understanding across these otherwise separately studied pools are especially encouraged.