SOIL CARBON CHECK: A TOOL FOR MONITORING AND GUIDING SOIL CARBON SEQUESTRATION IN FARMER FIELDS

Highlights

● Establishment of a rapid tool for monitoring soil carbon sequestration in farmer fields.

● Novel linkage of multiconstituent soil analyses with a carbon mineralization model.

● Extensive calibration and validation of the results of the near-infrared spectroscopy NIRS analyses.

● Soil bulk density derived from NIRS analyses and pedotransfer functions.

Abstract

In 2015, 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were approved, including SDG13, which addresses actions to increase carbon capture (CO₂-C storage) for climate change mitigation. However, no analytical procedures have been defined for quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration. This paper presents a rapid tool for guiding farmers and for monitoring SOC sequestration in farmer fields. The tool consists of multiconstituent soil analyses through near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and an SOC mineralization model. The tool provides forecasts of SOC sequestration over time. Soil analyses by NIRS have been calibrated and validated for farmer fields in European countries, China, New Zealand, and Vietnam. Results indicate a high accuracy of determination for SOC (R² ≥ 0.93), and for inorganic C, soil texture, and soil bulk density. Permanganate oxidizable soil C is used as proxy for active SOC, to detect early management-induced changes in SOC contents, and is also quantified by NIRS (R² = 0.92). A pedotransfer function is used to convert the results of the soil analyses to SOC sequestration in kg·ha⁻¹ C as well as CO₂. In conclusion, the tool allows fast, quantitative, and action-driven monitoring of SOC sequestration in farmer fields, and thereby is an essential tool for monitoring progress of SDG13.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

4 per 1000 initiative / carbon sequestration / climate action / farmer fields / SDG13 / soil organic carbon / soil testing

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Supplementary materials

The online version of this article at https://doi.org/10.15302/J-FASE-2023499 contains supplementary materials (Fig. S1; Tables S1–S3).

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge the Eurofins colleagues in China, Finland, France, Germany, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, UK, Vietnam, and the colleagues in Belarus and Lithuania contributed significantly to the development the NIRS system.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jan Adriaan Reijneveld, Martijn Jasper van Oostrum, Karst Michiel Brolsma, and Oene Oenema declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose. This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2023. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)