ABSTRACT
The term “soil organic carbon (SOC) pools” is commonly used to characterize various organic C components in the soil. For different researchers, the term may have very different meanings. To some, it may mean a physical fraction of plant residues at different stages of decomposition, or SOC associated with different soil particle size fractions; to others, it may be a chemical fraction containing specific chemical structures or functional groups. In recent years, the term has become popular in the literature on modeling of the dynamics of C transformations in the environment, as SOC can be compartmentalized into pools of different reactivities. The model-defined pools may or may not have any resemblance to the physically or chemically defined pools.
