Past project team member and MSc graduate Christina Lam has authored a paper titled “Methane consumption by a landfill cover soil under variable soil moisture and temperature conditions”. The paper was co-authored with team member Olivia Penn, co-Principal Investigator Fereidoun Rezanezhad, Principal Investigator Laura Hug, and members from the Ecohydrology Research Group and is published in Frontiers of Environmental Science.
The published article details findings from the team’s research experiments conducted under Activity 6 of the Mitigation of Methane Emission Hot-spots in Municipal Landfills project. In the study, the research team investigated the effects of soil moisture and temperature on methane consumption in landfill cover soils. They conducted a series of experiments to mimic variations in soil moisture and temperature resulting from seasonal dynamics and climate change, coupled with diffusion-reaction modelling simulations to observe optimal conditions for microbial methane oxidation in landfill soil.
The results from this study highlight the importance of soil moisture and temperature in modulating microbial soil reaction processes, applicable to the practical design and development of landfill cover soils.
A schematic of the incubation at different temperatures (A), methane injection procedure (B), and a sample graph showing the headspace concentrations of methane indicating consumption of the injected methane during the incubation (C).