Soil organic carbon (SOC) represents one of the major pools in the global carbon cycle. However, fluxes of CO2 from soils into the atmosphere by respiration or inversely sequestration of CO2 through photosynthesis and subsequent immobilisation in the form of humus are difficult to quantify. In principle changes in SOC stock over time reflect CO2 fluxes. The detection of these stock changes, how...

Soils are the third largest global reservoir of carbon and the largest terrestrial ecosystem sink or source of atmospheric CO2 depending on land-use and management. The French authorities ahead of COP21 proposed the ‘four per mil’ initiative aimed at offsetting most global agricultural CO2 emissions by increasing global soil organic carbon (SOC). Since, the Common Agricultural Policies (CAP) re...

We used the General Ensemble biogeochemical Modeling System (GEMS) to simulate responses of natural and managed ecosystems to changes in land use, management, and climate for a forest/savanna transitional zone in central Ghana. Model results show that deforestation for crop production during the last century resulted in a substantial re-5 duction in ecosystem carbon (C) stock from 135.4 Mg C ha...

The relationships between soils attributes, soil carbon stocks and vegetation carbon stocks are poorly know in Amazonia, even at regional scale. In this paper, we used the large and reliable soil database from Western Amazonia obtained from the RADAMBRASIL project and recent estimates of vegetation biomass to investigate some environmental relationships, quantifying C stocks of intact ecosystem...

Abstract The main hurdle in instrumentalizing agricultural soils to sequester atmospheric carbon is the development of methods measure soil stocks which are robust, scalable, and widely applicable. Our objective develop an approach that can help overcome these hurdles. In this paper, we present Wageningen Soil Carbon STOck pRotocol (SoilCASTOR). SoilCASTOR uses a novel fusing satellite data, di...

Accurately quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) is considered fundamental to studying soil quality, modeling the global carbon cycle, and assessing global climate change. This study evaluated the uncertainties caused by up-scaling of soil properties from the county scale to the provincial scale and from lower-level classification of Soil Species to Soil Group, using four methods: the mean, med...

Orchard understory represents an important component of the orchards, performing numerous functions related to soil quality, water relations and microclimate, but little attention has been paid on its effect on soil C sequestration. In the face of global climate change, fruit producers also require techniques that increase carbon (C) sequestration in a cost-effective manner. Here we present a c...

Changes in the sources and sinks of soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN) in wetland soils as indicators of soil quality and climate change have received attention worldwide. Soil samples were collected in 2007 and 2012 in the coastal wetlands of the Yellow River Delta and the SOC and TN were determined to investigate a five-year change in their content and stock in these wetlands a...

In agro-ecosystems, fertilization practices are crucial for sustaining crop productivity. Here, based on a 50-year long-term experiment, we studied the influence of fertilization practices (inorganic and/or organic) and nitrogen (N) application rates on (i) soil physicochemical properties, (ii) microbial and earthworm communities and (iii) crop production. Our results showed that soil organic c...