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.
1.Colorado State Univ, Dept Soil & Crop Sci, Ft Collins, CO 80523 USA 2.Univ Wisconsin, Dept Agron, 1575 Linden Dr, Madison, WI 53706 USA 3.CSIRO, Adelaide, SA, Australia 4.Australian Dept Environm & Energy, Canberra, ACT, Australia 5.Carbon Cycle Inst, Petaluma, CA USA 6.Union Concerned Scientists, Washington, DC USA 7.SRUC, Scotlands Rural Coll, Edinburgh, Midlothian, Scotland 8.Agr & Agri Food Canada, Lethbridge, AB, Canada 9.Int Inst Appl Syst Anal, Vienna, Austria 10.Alberta Agr & Forestry, Edmonton, AB, Canada 11.Int Maize & Wheat Improvement Ctr, Texcoco, Mexico 12.CSIRO, Brisbane, Qld, Australia 13.USDA, Nat Resources Conservat Serv, Miles City, MT USA 14.Univ Maryland, Dept Geog Sci, College Pk, MD 20742 USA 15.Texas A&M Univ, Texas AgriLife Res, Temple, TX USA 16.Crop Res Inst, Prague, Czech Republic 17.Agr & Agri Food Canada, Swift Current, SK, Canada 18.Point Blue Conservat Sci, Petaluma, CA USA 19.Kansas State Univ, Dept Agron, Manhattan, KS 66506 USA 20.Soil Sci & Conservat Res Inst, Natl Agr & Food Ctr, Bratislava, Slovakia
Recommended Citation:
Paustian, Keith,Collier, Sarah,Baldock, Jeff,et al. Quantifying carbon for agricultural soil management: from the current status toward a global soil information system[J]. CARBON MANAGEMENT,2019-01-01