Adjusting land management practices to increase carbon sequestration potential is becoming increasingly needed to mitigate climate change, but detailed quantification of carbon change and permanence is lacking. Therefore, understanding the impact of land management activities on soil and vegetation carbon sequestration requires an integrated approach that combines new advances in aboveground dynamic vegetation modeling with belowground process-based biogeochemistry modeling. For example, aboveground processes, such as dynamic and mechanistic plant growth, mortality, recruitment and changes to litter production under climate change will directly influence organic matter input to the soil. Conversely, belowground biogeochemical processes, including microbial decomposition, nutrient cycling, and soil organic matter stabilization, govern the transformation and storage of carbon in soils. By integrating these two modeling approaches, we can capture the full spectrum of interactions between plant systems under land management practices and soil biogeochemistry. To be able to accurately predict these complex ecological processes we are using the demographic vegetation model FATES (Functionally-Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator) that is coupled to the land surface model ELM. We present here the newly implemented representation of nutrient competition, acquisition, and extensible approach of nutrient and carbon allocation within plants. This work couples the interactions of nutrients between soil biogeochemistry in ELM and plant productivity and carbon in FATES, with improved model hypothesis testing for plant’s nutrient storage capacity. We present here how this integration allows for a more accurate representation of carbon sequestration potential in emerging nature-based solutions projects as well as comparison to non-managed baseline systems under climate change.