Credit: Image by Xuefeng Zhu.
The soil microbial carbon pump (MCP) moves carbon derived from microbial anabolism into soil where it can become stabilized by the entombing effect. The yin-yang symbol represents a key part of soil MCP that links aboveground vegetation to belowground soil, and creates a sense of movement to illustrate that the movement is driven, but driven differently, by fungi and bacteria.