Quantifying carbon for agricultural soil management: from the current status toward a global soil information system

“The importance of building/maintaining soil carbon, for soil health and CO₂ mitigation, is of increasing interest to a wide audience, including policymakers, NGOs and land managers. Integral to any approaches to promote carbon sequestering practices in managed soils are reliable, accurate and cost-effective means to quantify soil C stock changes and forecast soil C responses to different management, climate and edaphic conditions. While technology to accurately measure soil C concentrations and stocks has been in use for decades, many challenges to routine, cost-effective soil C quantification remain, including large spatial variability, low signal-to-noise and often high cost and standardization issues for direct measurement with destructive sampling. Models, empirical and process-based, may provide a cost-effective and practical means for soil C quantification to support C sequestration policies. Examples are described of how soil science and soil C quantification methods are being used to support domestic climate change policies to promote soil C sequestration on agricultural lands (cropland and grazing land) at national and provincial levels in Australia and Canada. Finally, a quantification system is outlined – consisting of well-integrated data-model frameworks, supported by expanded measurement and monitoring networks, remote sensing and crowd-sourcing of management activity data – that could comprise the core of a new global soil information system.”

Keith Paustian, Sarah Collier, Jeff Baldock, Rachel Burgess, Jeff Creque, Marcia DeLonge, Jennifer Dungait, Ben Ellert, Stefan Frank,Tom Goddard, Bram Govaerts, Mike Grundy, Mark Henning, R. César Izaurralde, Mikuláš Madaras, Brian McConkey, Elizabeth Porzig, Charles Rice, Ross Searle, Nathaniel Seavy, Rastislav Skalsky, William Mulhern & Molly Jahn (2019) Quantifying carbon for agricultural soil management: from the current status toward a global soil information system, Carbon Management | View Article

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