Soil contains about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere and plants combined.
Soil contains about twice as much carbon as the atmosphere and plants combined. It is a major carbon sink, capable of absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than it releases. Management of soil carbon is key in efforts to mitigate climate change, in addition to being vital to soil health and agricultural productivity.
Measuring soil carbon, however, is a painstaking, expensive process. Samples must be dug from the ground and sent to a lab for analysis, making upscaling measurements on a large spatial scale challenging.
Now environmental scientists have combined field-level data with machine-learning techniques to estimate soil organic carbon at the U.S. continental scale. The Journal of Geophysical Research — Biogeosciences published the new soil organic carbon estimate, which improves the overall estimate for the United States and gives new insights into the effects of environmental variables on soil organic carbon.
Read more at Emory University
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