Saving the face of soil aggregates

Three recent papers: "Aggregates as biogeochemical reactors" (Wang et al., 2019a), "Soil aggregates as biogeochemical reactors: Not a way forward …" (Kravchenko et al., 2019), and "Building bottom-up aggregate based models …" (Wang et al., 2019b) presented contrasting views on the importance of aggregates for C and N turnover, with a main focus on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Wang et al. (2019a) stated that all biogeochemical reactions are ongoing in aggregates and that, after sophisticated integration of environmental factors into models at the aggregate scale, it is possible to upscale GHG fluxes up to global level and make predictions under climate change. In contrast, Kravchenko et al. (2019) argued for the absence of aggregates in soils in situ, and demonstrated that the concept of Wang et al. (2019) is misleading. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.