Reply to referees RC1 and RC2

Olli Nevalainen

doi:10.5194/gi-2021-21-ac1

Abstract

Better monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of the amount, additionality and persistence of the sequestered soil carbon is needed to understand the best carbon farming practices for different soils and climate conditions, as well as their actual climate benefits or cost-efficiency in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. This paper presents our Field Observatory Network (FiON) of researchers, farmers, companies and other stakeholders developing carbon farming practices. FiON has established a unified methodology towards monitoring and forecasting agricultural carbon sequestration by combining offline and near real-time field measurements, weather data, satellite imagery, modeling and computing networks. FiON’s first phase consists of two intensive research sites and 20 voluntary pilot farms testing carbon farming practices in Finland. To disseminate the data, FiON built a web-based dashboard called Field Observatory (v1.0, fieldobservatory.org). Field Observatory is designed as an online service for near real-time model-data synthesis, forecasting and decision support for the farmers who are able to monitor the effects of carbon farming practices. The most advanced features of the Field Observatory are visible on the Qvidja site which acts as a prototype for the most recent implementations. Overall, FiON aims to create new knowledge on agricultural soil carbon sequestration and effects of carbon farming practices, and provide an MRV tool for decision-support.

Highlights

Farmers are managing one of the largest carbon stocks on the planet where even relatively small additions are important for climate change mitigation
The international “soil carbon 4 per mille” initiative aims at raising the soil organic carbon content by 0.4 % per year by adopting carbon farming practices (Minasny et al 2017)
Detecting sequestration rates in this range is difficult with traditional empirical soil sampling designs due to large spatial variability of soil carbon content and small relative changes in the soil carbon stock due to individual management actions (VandenBygaart and Angers 2006; Heikkinen et al 2021)

Summary

Introduction

Farmers are managing one of the largest carbon stocks on the planet where even relatively small additions are important for climate change mitigation. Carbon farming practices include methods, such as reduced soil disturbance (reduced or zero tillage), increasing carbon inputs (soil amendments, cover crops, residue management) and crop rotations. Such practices do have the potential to partially refill the global soil carbon stock that has lost 116 Pg carbon due to land cultivation (Sanderman et al, 2017), but they could improve soil structure and health, and increase crop yields (Merante et al 2017; Oldfield et al 2018). Detecting sequestration rates in this range is difficult with traditional empirical soil sampling designs due to large spatial variability of soil carbon content and small relative changes in the soil carbon stock due to individual management actions

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Discussion

Conclusion