18
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      The role of soil in regulation of climate

      review-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          The soil carbon (C) stock, comprising soil organic C (SOC) and soil inorganic C (SIC) and being the largest reservoir of the terrestrial biosphere, is a critical part of the global C cycle. Soil has been a source of greenhouse gases (GHGs) since the dawn of settled agriculture about 10 millenia ago. Soils of agricultural ecosystems are depleted of their SOC stocks and the magnitude of depletion is greater in those prone to accelerated erosion by water and wind and other degradation processes. Adoption of judicious land use and science-based management practices can lead to re-carbonization of depleted soils and make them a sink for atmospheric C. Soils in humid climates have potential to increase storage of SOC and those in arid and semiarid climates have potential to store both SOC and SIC. Payments to land managers for sequestration of C in soil, based on credible measurement of changes in soil C stocks at farm or landscape levels, are also important for promoting adoption of recommended land use and management practices. In conjunction with a rapid and aggressive reduction in GHG emissions across all sectors of the economy, sequestration of C in soil (and vegetation) can be an important negative emissions method for limiting global warming to 1.5 or 2°C

          This article is part of the theme issue ‘The role of soils in delivering Nature's Contributions to People’.

          Related collections

          Most cited references110

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Soil carbon sequestration impacts on global climate change and food security.

          R. Lal (2004)
          The carbon sink capacity of the world's agricultural and degraded soils is 50 to 66% of the historic carbon loss of 42 to 78 gigatons of carbon. The rate of soil organic carbon sequestration with adoption of recommended technologies depends on soil texture and structure, rainfall, temperature, farming system, and soil management. Strategies to increase the soil carbon pool include soil restoration and woodland regeneration, no-till farming, cover crops, nutrient management, manuring and sludge application, improved grazing, water conservation and harvesting, efficient irrigation, agroforestry practices, and growing energy crops on spare lands. An increase of 1 ton of soil carbon pool of degraded cropland soils may increase crop yield by 20 to 40 kilograms per hectare (kg/ha) for wheat, 10 to 20 kg/ha for maize, and 0.5 to 1 kg/ha for cowpeas. As well as enhancing food security, carbon sequestration has the potential to offset fossil fuel emissions by 0.4 to 1.2 gigatons of carbon per year, or 5 to 15% of the global fossil-fuel emissions.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: found
            Is Open Access

            SoilGrids250m: Global gridded soil information based on machine learning

            This paper describes the technical development and accuracy assessment of the most recent and improved version of the SoilGrids system at 250m resolution (June 2016 update). SoilGrids provides global predictions for standard numeric soil properties (organic carbon, bulk density, Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), pH, soil texture fractions and coarse fragments) at seven standard depths (0, 5, 15, 30, 60, 100 and 200 cm), in addition to predictions of depth to bedrock and distribution of soil classes based on the World Reference Base (WRB) and USDA classification systems (ca. 280 raster layers in total). Predictions were based on ca. 150,000 soil profiles used for training and a stack of 158 remote sensing-based soil covariates (primarily derived from MODIS land products, SRTM DEM derivatives, climatic images and global landform and lithology maps), which were used to fit an ensemble of machine learning methods—random forest and gradient boosting and/or multinomial logistic regression—as implemented in the R packages ranger, xgboost, nnet and caret. The results of 10–fold cross-validation show that the ensemble models explain between 56% (coarse fragments) and 83% (pH) of variation with an overall average of 61%. Improvements in the relative accuracy considering the amount of variation explained, in comparison to the previous version of SoilGrids at 1 km spatial resolution, range from 60 to 230%. Improvements can be attributed to: (1) the use of machine learning instead of linear regression, (2) to considerable investments in preparing finer resolution covariate layers and (3) to insertion of additional soil profiles. Further development of SoilGrids could include refinement of methods to incorporate input uncertainties and derivation of posterior probability distributions (per pixel), and further automation of spatial modeling so that soil maps can be generated for potentially hundreds of soil variables. Another area of future research is the development of methods for multiscale merging of SoilGrids predictions with local and/or national gridded soil products (e.g. up to 50 m spatial resolution) so that increasingly more accurate, complete and consistent global soil information can be produced. SoilGrids are available under the Open Data Base License.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Carbon pools and flux of global forest ecosystems.

              Forest systems cover more than 4.1 x 10(9) hectares of the Earth's land area. Globally, forest vegetation and soils contain about 1146 petagrams of carbon, with approximately 37 percent of this carbon in low-latitude forests, 14 percent in mid-latitudes, and 49 percent at high latitudes. Over two-thirds of the carbon in forest ecosystems is contained in soils and associated peat deposits. In 1990, deforestation in the low latitudes emitted 1.6 +/- 0.4 petagrams of carbon per year, whereas forest area expansion and growth in mid- and high-latitude forest sequestered 0.7 +/- 0.2 petagrams of carbon per year, for a net flux to the atmosphere of 0.9 +/- 0.4 petagrams of carbon per year. Slowing deforestation, combined with an increase in forestation and other management measures to improve forest ecosystem productivity, could conserve or sequester significant quantities of carbon. Future forest carbon cycling trends attributable to losses and regrowth associated with global climate and land-use change are uncertain. Model projections and some results suggest that forests could be carbon sinks or sources in the future.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
                Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
                RSTB
                royptb
                Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
                The Royal Society
                0962-8436
                1471-2970
                September 27, 2021
                Auguest 4, 2021
                Auguest 4, 2021
                : 376
                : 1834 , Theme issue ‘The role of soils in delivering Nature's Contributions to People’ compiled and edited by Pete Smith, Saskia D. Keesstra, Whendee L. Silver and Tapan K. Adhya
                : 20210084
                Affiliations
                [ 1 ] CFAES Rattan Lal Center for Carbon Management and Sequestration, The Ohio State University, , Columbus, OH 43210, USA
                [ 2 ] Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences, New Mexico State University, , Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA
                [ 3 ] Biological Station and Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, , Ann Arbor, MI 48104, USA
                [ 4 ] Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science, United States Department of Agriculture Forest Service, , Houghton, MI 49931, USA
                [ 5 ] Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Aberdeen, , Aberdeen AB24 3UU, UK
                Author notes

                One contribution of 17 to a theme issue ‘ The role of soils in delivering Nature's Contributions to People’.

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9016-2972
                http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3784-1124
                Article
                rstb20210084
                10.1098/rstb.2021.0084
                8349633
                34365818
                696b1126-59e0-40c6-af3c-d9f755f3c05c
                © 2021 The Authors.

                Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : June 15, 2021
                Categories
                1001
                69
                Articles
                Review Articles
                Custom metadata
                September 27, 2021

                Philosophy of science
                climate,soil carbon sequestration,soil inorganic carbon,forest soils,global warming,land-based solutions

                Comments

                Comment on this article