We🤎Soil! Join these field technicians as they “dig deeper” on #WorldSoilDay to uncover the connections between soil carbon and ecosystem health. ⛏️ This timelapse shows a team of USGS scientists collecting soil samples and monitoring plants in an invasive grass dominated sagebrush steppe ecosystem in Colorado. 🌱 All that digging revealed that wildfires and invasion by exotic grasses can decrease soil carbon levels by approximately 50%. Soil carbon can impact a wide range of ecosystem functions, including nutrient and water retention, erosion control, and drought resilience.🔥 These losses occur not just at the surface, but up to a meter deep, affecting carbon that can take thousands of years to build up. Wildfires and grass invasions impact rangelands around the world including 10s of millions of acres in the western U.S., so those carbon losses could have a global climate change impact. 🪣 Protecting healthy sagebrush steppe ecosystems from wildfire and invasion could help keep...