Each year the KBS LTER program awards two graduate students with summer research fellowships. Here Michelle Quigley describes the research her 2015 summer fellowship supported. Michelle is a Ph.D. student in Sasha Kravchenko's lab at Michigan State University. When most people think of studying soils in agricultural systems, they picture someone out in a field taking soil samples or surveying crops or in a lab running samples. That is fairly typical for most soil scientists. However, while I do get out in the field, most of my time is spent staring at a computer screen. Carbon is