Excerpt
Maintaining or improving soil properties is becoming increasingly important to sustain modern agriculture under increasing demands to preserve biodiversity and environmental quality. Enhancing the inherent capacity of a soil to buffer changes against anthropogenic stresses and extreme climatic events such as droughts, intense rainstorms, heat waves, and floods is also a priority. Managing soil organic carbon (SOC) through optimized management practices is one strategy to enhance soil ecosystem services. Increasing organic C storage in the soil not only sequesters atmospheric C but often enhances soil physical, chemical, and biological processes and properties. Soil organic C has been widely discussed in terms of C sequestration, but its benefits on soil processes and properties have received less attention in recent years. Thus, this article discusses (1) the value of SOC to soil properties and (2) potential for increasing SOC through management.
SOIL CARBON DYNAMICS The balance between C inputs and outputs is important to SOC change. Inputs include aboveground and belowground crop residues, animal manure, compost, and others, whereas outputs are losses through water and wind erosion, gas fluxes associated with microbial and plant respiration, and deep leaching.
How fast residues decompose following the well-known exponential decay function depends…
- © 2013 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society