This Special Issue focuses on the chemistry underpinning organic carbon cycling across the atmosphere, cryosphere, soils, inland waters, ocean, sediments, and subsurface. We invite work that reveals mechanisms, connects reservoirs, and improves prediction using both analytical and modeling approaches. Submit by July 1, 2027.

Author Guidelines
Peaceful freshwater wetland with reflective water, clusters of reeds, and tree-lined shores, illuminated by bright sunlight filtering through clouds.

Organic carbon cycling across Earth’s reservoirs drives biogeochemical processes that regulate ecosystem function, carbon storage, greenhouse gas dynamics, and climate–carbon feedbacks. These reservoirs include the atmosphere, terrestrial ecosystems, inland waters, the open ocean from surface to deep sea, the cryosphere, and long-term geologic stores in sediments and the subsurface. Organic matter is continuously produced, transformed, transported, and degraded through interacting chemical, microbial, and physical processes that link environmental media across broad spatial and temporal scales. Understanding the mechanistic chemistry underlying these transformations is essential for predicting how carbon reservoirs will respond to warming, altered hydrology, land use change, disturbances, ocean change, and shifts in atmospheric composition.

Across landscapes and waterscapes, diverse environments shape organic carbon fate through mineral–organic interactions in soils, freeze–thaw dynamics in the cryosphere, redox-driven transformations in inland waters, mixing and salinity gradients at land–water interfaces, and particle and water column processes in coastal and marine systems. Atmospheric chemistry connects gaseous, aerosol, and cloud-phase organic carbon to terrestrial and aquatic pools, while long-term burial and subsurface reactions link modern cycling to geologic storage. This Special Issue in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry focuses on the chemistry that governs these processes, with an emphasis on mechanistic insights, cross-reservoir linkages, and emerging analytical and modeling approaches. We welcome contributions that advance conceptual understanding, propose new frameworks, or provide quantitative tools to project organic carbon dynamics from molecular to global scales.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Chemical pathways governing the formation, transformation, and decomposition of soil, aquatic, and atmospheric organic matter
  • Reactive chemistry at organo‑mineral and organo‑metal interfaces in soils and sediments
  • Organic reaction mechanisms mediated by soil–microbe–plant interactions
  • Molecular‑level characterization and structural elucidation of terrestrial, atmospheric, and aquatic organic carbon
  • Chemical transformation pathways of dissolved and particulate organic carbon in freshwater systems
  • Multiphase (heterogeneous) chemical transformation pathways of organic carbon
  • Redox chemistry and microbially driven electron‑transfer processes controlling organic matter reactivity
  • Photochemical and photo‑oxidative degradation of organic carbon in surface waters and in the atmosphere
  • Emerging analytical techniques for molecular-level characterization of environmental organic carbon
  • Chemical interactions and transformation of organic carbon in estuarine and coastal environments
  • Effects of pollutants, nutrients, and anthropogenic inputs on organic carbon chemistry
  • Mechanistic, reactive transport, data‑driven, and AI-enabled modeling approaches for predicting organic carbon cycling

Organizing Editors

Prof. Zhenqing Shi, Associate Editor, ACS Earth and Space Chemistry 
South China University of Technology, China

Prof. Jason Surratt, Guest Editor
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, United States

Submission Information

We welcome submissions for this Special Issue through July 1, 2027. For more information on submission requirements, please visit the journal’s Author Guidelines page.

Accepted manuscripts for consideration in this Special Issue will include research articles, letters, and invited perspectives and reviews. Papers accepted for publication for this Special Issue will be available ASAP (as soon as publishable) online. After all submissions have been published, they will then be compiled online on a dedicated landing page to form the Special Issue. Manuscripts submitted for consideration will undergo the full rigorous peer review process expected from ACS journals.

Open Access: There are diverse open access options for publications in American Chemical Society journals. Please visit our Open Science Resource Center for more information.

How to Submit

  • Log in to the ACS Publishing Center.
  • Select your manuscript type; upload your manuscript and related files.
  • Review the title and abstract fields to ensure any pre-populated information has uploaded correctly.
  • Under "Special Issue Selection," select The Chemistry of Organic Carbon Cycling in the Environment.
  • Confirm all other information has uploaded correctly.
  • Submit your article.

If you have any general questions regarding submission to this Special Issue, please contact Dr. Rowan Brower (managing.editor@earthspacechem.acs.org)

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