Catchment vegetation and erosion controls soil carbon cycling in south-eastern Australia during the last two Glacial-Interglacial cycles

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The vegetation structure in vast semi-arid to temperate continental land masses, particularly in Australia, play a considerable role in global terrestrial carbon dioxide sequestration. However, whether soil-carbon is a net atmospheric carbon source or sink remains contentious, introducing large uncertainties on long-term storage of vegetation-sequestered carbon dioxide. We investigate the interplay between catchment erosion (quantified by means of uranium isotopes), vegetation (pollen), catchment carbon cycling, wetland response (diatoms), and lake carbon accumulation on glacial-interglacial timescales in south-eastern Australia during the last (133.5 ka to 107.6 ka) and current (17.8 cal ka BP to present day) glacial-interglacial cycle. The analyses are applied to the This manuscript is a non-peer reviewed EarthArXiv pre-print.