Because agricultural use modifies the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the soil, knowing and understanding the spatial distribution of carbon is essential for the design of conservation strategies, in line with the need to continue producing food for a population. growing world.
“An increase in the soil carbon stock impacts the physical, chemical, and biological properties, not only of the soil, but of the entire ecosystem,” Sasal explained.
Based on this scenario, he stressed that “now having an updated map with data from the last five or six years of carbon in the first 30 centimeters in different eco-regions and different soil orders allows us to have a baseline.”
“If we compare the information (from the FAO on the carbon reserve in the first 30 centimeters of the soil), we see that Argentina has 2% of the world’s carbon reserve,” he emphasized.
For Sasal, this information “will make it possible to work on carbon credit schemes, evaluate in different regions what are the practices and strategies that we must implement to increase storage and reduce greenhouse gas emissions”
Due to the great importance of soil organic carbon on a global scale, “there is a growing interest in estimating and mapping the remaining reserves and their potential for change to sequester carbon with greater precision and at finer spatial resolutions and larger geographic extensions. “, expressed for his part the coordinator of INTA’s National Forestry Program, Pablo Peri.
The team of researchers collected information from around 5,400 soil samples from all over the national territory, processed by different research projects between 2015 and 2022.
To prepare the map, they used digital soil mapping techniques to study the relationship between the measured data and 40 climatic, topographic, edaphic, and vegetation variables, to generate a prediction model that allows estimating the SOC reserve in places not measured and obtain a national scale map.
Of the country’s 16 ecoregions, the Patagonian Steppe, the Pampa, and the Dry Chaco are the ones that contain the largest SOC reserve and, in total, these three ecoregions represent approximately 55% of the country’s reserve.
While the fields and weeds, Esteros del Iberá and Islas del Atlántico Sur are the ecoregions with the lowest SOC reserve, with 1.1% of the total, influenced by the area occupied by these ecoregions.
By surface unit, the Patagonian Forest ecoregion is the one with the highest content, with 130 tons per hectare; while the plains and plateaus forest is the one with the lowest content with 32.5 tons per hectare.
“This study indicates that, with small increases in carbon sequestration, soils have great potential to modify the country’s carbon dioxide balance and contribute to the mitigation of global climate change,” added Juan Gaitán, coordinator of the Monitoring project. of degradation of landscapes and productive systems with goals in the neutrality of land degradation.
In addition, Argentina’s protected areas cover an approximate area of 20.3 million hectares, and store almost 9% of the country’s total SOC reserve.
For his part, the National Director of Agriculture, Agustín Pérez Andrich, affirmed that “the implementation of good management practices for extensive crops in Pampas soils can maximize the capacity of these soils to sequester carbon, which represents an important strategy for its conservation, as well as climate change mitigation”.
Along these lines, INTA Paraná (Entre Ríos) researcher Ana Wingeyer pointed out that “the work presented provides a baseline for developing carbon credit trading schemes, and can help identify and prioritize potential locations for carbon soil-based carbon sequestration.
“The concept that soils and agriculture can simultaneously represent solutions to global problems, such as climate change and lack of food security, gave rise to several international initiatives that seek to conserve and increase the stock of organic carbon”added Wingeyer.
The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification adopted the mapping of SOC reserves as one of the indicators to estimate the area of degraded land in the context of monitoring the goal of achieving neutrality in land degradation towards 2030.
“For this reason, the map and its future updates will contribute to reporting progress on the goals committed, before these international initiatives, to carry out local actions to limit emissions and to conserve and increase sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases,” Peri stressed.
Source: Ambito
