How soil carbon is stabilized during centuries of cultivation and how this would be influenced by land use
largely remain unclear. Here the relative role of physical and chemical stabilization mechanisms in
agricultural soil organic carbon (SOC)accumulationwere studied by fractionation of paddy/upland cropland
soils along a 500-year soil chronosequence created by intermittent reclamation of estuarine wetlands. In
unreclaimed wetlands, about 50% of SOC was chemically-stabilized by binding to Fe/Al oxyhydrates (mainly
amorphous Fe) and 30% by unknown forms of chemical association with silt/clay particles. Physical
stabilizationofSOC bysoil aggregationwasnegligibleinwetlands.Afterconversionofwetlandstocroplands,
SOC rapidly declined within the
first 16 years and then recovered slowly with cultivation time. Chemical
mechanismsstilldominatedSOC stabilizationprocessesduring500yearsofcultivation,butthecontribution
of Fe/Al-bound and Ca-bound carbon to total SOC decreased with time. The contribution of physically
stabilized carbon (i.e. microaggregate-occluded particulate organic carbon,iPOM) to SOCkept around 16% in
croplands even when microaggregate contents increased from 8.83% to 30.52% between 16 and 500 years.
The iPOM fractionwas not closely related to microaggregate formation but to free coarse particulate organic
matter, a carbon fraction indicative of inputs of plant materials. Consistently higher SOC density in paddy
soils than in upland soils was observed along the chronosequence, which could be accounted for by higher
contents of physical andchemical carbon fractions inpaddy
fields.The higher physically-stabilized carbon of
paddy soils probably resulted from larger stubble return rather than from stronger soil aggregation given
similar contents of microaggregates between the two cropland types. Notably, in both paddy and upland
soils, carbon concentrations of intra-microaggregate silt/clay particles were consistently higher than those
of free silt/clay particles. An implication was that despite the small proportion (