The effects of land use on soil carbon stocks in the UK

The effects of land use on soil carbon stocks in the UK

Greenhouse gas stabilisation in the atmosphere is one of the most pressing challenges of this century. Sequestering carbon in the soil by changing land use and management is increasingly proposed as part of climate mitigation strategies, but our understanding of this is limited in quantitative terms...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Biogeosciences Vol. 21; no. 19; pp. 4301 - 4315
Main Authors: Levy, Peter, Bentley, Laura, Danks, Peter, Emmett, Bridget, Garbutt, Angus, Heming, Stephen, Henrys, Peter, Keith, Aidan, Lebron, Inma, McNamara, Niall, Pywell, Richard, Redhead, John, Robinson, David, Wickenden, Alexander
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Katlenburg-Lindau Copernicus GmbH 02-10-2024
Copernicus Publications
Subjects:
Agricultural land
Analysis
Carbon
Carbon content
Carbon sequestration
Climate change mitigation
Cores
Data analysis
Datasets
Estimates
Grasslands
Greenhouse gases
Land use
Land use management
Rankings
Sequestering
Soil
Soil analysis
Soils
Statistical models
Stocks
Uncertainty analysis
Validity
Variability
Woodlands
United Kingdom > UK
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Summary:Greenhouse gas stabilisation in the atmosphere is one of the most pressing challenges of this century. Sequestering carbon in the soil by changing land use and management is increasingly proposed as part of climate mitigation strategies, but our understanding of this is limited in quantitative terms. Here we collate a substantial national and regional data set (15 790 soil cores) and analyse it in an advanced statistical modelling framework. This produced new estimates of the effects of land use on soil carbon stock (Sc) in the UK, different in magnitude and ranking order from the previous best estimates. Soil carbon stocks were highest in woodlands, followed by rough grazing, semi-natural grasslands, and improved grasslands, and they were lowest in croplands. Estimates were smaller than the previous estimates, partly because of new data, but mainly because the effect is more reliably characterised using a logarithmic transformation of the data. With the very large data set analysed here, the uncertainty in the differences among land uses was small enough to identify consistent mean effects. However, the variability in these effects was large, and this variability was similar across all surveys. This has important implications for agri-environment schemes seeking to sequester carbon in the soil by altering land use, because the effect of a given intervention is very hard to verify. We examined the validity of the “space-for-time” substitution, and, although the results were not unequivocal, we estimated that the effects are likely to be overestimated by 5 %–33 %, depending upon land use.
ISSN:1726-4189
1726-4170
1726-4189
DOI:10.5194/bg-21-4301-2024