Biochar: Carbon Sequestration, Land Remediation, and Impacts on Soil Microbiology

Biochar—charcoal used to amend land and sequester carbon—is attracting considerable interest. Its distinctive physical/chemical/biological properties, including high water-holding capacity, large surface area, cation exchange capacity, elemental composition, and pore size/volume/distribution, effect its recognized impacts, especially on microbial communities. These are explored in the context of agriculture, composting, and land remediation/restoration. Considerable focus is given to mycorrhizal associations, which are central to exploitation in environmental technologies involving biochar. The characteristics of biochar, its availability for nutrient cycling, including the beneficial and potentially negative/inhibitory impacts, and the requisite multidisciplinary analysis (physicochemical, microbiological, and molecular) to study these in detail, are explored.