Soil Carbon

With carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere increasing in recent decades, there is a growing urgency to find strategies for capturing and holding carbon.

Tropical forests account for more than 50% of the global terrestrial carbon sink, but climate change threatens to alter the carbon balance of these ecosystems.

The 2015–2016 El Niño hit the Amazon basin hard, causing a drought that severely reduced aboveground vegetation and caused the basin to release nearly 1 gigaton of carbon into the atmosphere.

Soil aggregates are the basic units of soil structure and serve as a reservoir for soil carbon, playing a crucial role in the carbon cycle of ecosystems. The pore characteristics of soil aggregates influence the mineralization of soil organic carbon. However, research on the mechanisms of soil organic carbon sequestration at the aggregate level in Mollisols is limited.

Livestock grazing can either be a source of greenhouse gas emissions or a sink for these emissions, depending on the intensity of grazing, according to a new study.

New research from Michigan State University shows how evaluating historical crop yields across distinct areas of agricultural fields can provide farmers with essential information on soil health characteristics and carbon sequestration. The paper was published in Scientific Reports.

Nutrient-rich soil known as "dark earth" has been cultivated by Indigenous farmers in the Amazon for centuries, leaving behind a large and still uncounted store of carbon

The Midwestern United States has lost 57.6 billion tons of topsoil due to farming practices over the past 160 years, and the rate of erosion, even following the U.S. Department of Agriculture's guidelines, is still 25 times higher than the rate at which topsoil forms.

MIT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Cèsar Terrer says that unused croplands have a significant potential to act as carbon sinks and help to mitigate climate change, but research is needed to identify the most promising areas.

Sometimes to go forward, you must go back.

Keeping tree diversity intact in Canada's many forests over the long term can help increase carbon capture and mitigate climate change, according to a new University of Alberta study.

Tropical rainforests store 25%-40% of global soil carbon, though they occupy only 7% of Earth's land area. By functioning as a carbon sink, tropical forests prevent more severe effects from climate change.

A new law tasks the agency with creating resources for farmers, but it may not address their biggest concerns

Forest soil is a larger carbon storage than trees, and forest management affects soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sinks. A publication by the international HoliSoils project emphasizes that the European forest sector needs a comprehensive understanding of the carbon sequestration potential of soils. This will help design climate change mitigation measures.

Over the last decade, researchers have sounded the alarm on soil erosion being the biggest threat to global food security. As world governments moved to implement soil conservation practices, a new debate began: does agricultural soil erosion create a net organic carbon (OC) sink or source? The question is a crucial one, as carbon sinks absorb more carbon than they release, while carbon sources release more carbon…

New practices aim to improve soil health, return more carbon to soil and reduce greenhouse gas losses.

The promise for American agriculture is tantalizing: healthier soil, more carbon kept in the ground, less fertilizer runoff, and less need for chemicals. The reality of planting cover crops during the off-season—a much-touted and subsidized approach to climate change mitigation—is more complicated, according to new Stanford University-led research.

Growers are using images taken from space to quantify how much carbon is stored in their soil and validate the credits they're selling.

Scientists have long known that no-till farming reduces erosion and lessens water and nutrient runoff from crop fields, but now a new study by a team of Penn State researchers suggests that limiting soil disturbance may also diminish releases of nitrous oxide.

Grasslands have the capability to store carbon, functioning as an important tool in a battle against climate change. While scientific interest in grassland soil for carbon sequestration is not new, researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Colorado State University have provided a fresh analysis of the existing research on soil carbon sequestration in grasslands. According to the researchers, they apply…