Verifiable soil organic carbon modelling to facilitate regional reporting of cropland carbon change: A test case in the Czech Republic

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00027006%3A_____%2F20%3A10149654" target="_blank" >RIV/00027006:_____/20:10149654 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479720311312/pdfft?md5=2695b45ab3beafa0d6502c0d26410664&pid=1-s2.0-S0301479720311312-main.pdf" target="_blank" >https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301479720311312/pdfft?md5=2695b45ab3beafa0d6502c0d26410664&pid=1-s2.0-S0301479720311312-main.pdf</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

<a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111206" target="_blank" >10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.111206</a>

Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Verifiable soil organic carbon modelling to facilitate regional reporting of cropland carbon change: A test case in the Czech Republic

Original language description

Regional monitoring, reporting and verification of soil organic carbon change occurring in managed cropland are indispensable to support carbon-related policies. Rapidly evolving gridded agronomic models can facilitate these efforts throughout Europe. However, their performance in modelling soil carbon dynamics at regional scale is yet unexplored. Importantly, as such models are often driven by large-scale inputs, they need to be benchmarked against field experiments. We elucidate the level of detail that needs to be incorporated in gridded models to robustly estimate regional soil carbon dynamics in managed cropland, testing the approach for regions in the Czech Republic. We first calibrated the biogeochemical Environmental Policy Integrated Climate (EPIC) model against long-term experiments. Subsequently, we examined the EPIC model within a top-down gridded modelling framework constructed for European agricultural soils from Europe-wide datasets and regional land-use statistics. We explored the top-down, as opposed to a bottom-up, modelling approach for reporting agronomically relevant and verifiable soil carbon dynamics. In comparison with a no-input baseline, the regional EPIC model suggested soil carbon changes (similar to 0.1-0.5 Mg C ha(-1)y(-1)) consistent with empirical-based studies for all studied agricultural practices. However, inaccurate soil information, crop management inputs, or inappropriate model calibration may undermine regional modelling of cropland management effect on carbon since each of the three components carry uncertainty (similar to 0.5-1.5 Mg C ha(-1)y(-1)) that is substantially larger than the actual effect of agricultural practices relative to the no-input baseline. Besides, inaccurate soil data obtained from the background datasets biased the simulated carbon trends compared to observations, thus hampering the model&apos;s verifiability at the locations of field experiments. Encouragingly, the top-down agricultural management derived from regional land-use statistics proved suitable for the estimation of soil carbon dynamics consistently with actual field practices. Despite sensitivity to biophysical parameters, we found a robust scalability of the soil organic carbon routine for various climatic regions and soil types represented in the Czech experiments. The model performed better than the tier 1 methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which indicates a great potential for improved carbon change modelling over larger political regions.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

J_imp - Article in a specialist periodical, which is included in the Web of Science database

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

40101 - Agriculture

Project

—

Continuities

I - Institucionalni podpora na dlouhodoby koncepcni rozvoj vyzkumne organizace

Publication year

2020

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Name of the periodical

JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT

ISSN

0301-4797

e-ISSN

—

Volume of the periodical

274

Issue of the periodical within the volume

NOV 15 2020

Country of publishing house

GB - UNITED KINGDOM

Number of pages

16

Pages from-to

111206

UT code for WoS article

000582470000037

EID of the result in the Scopus database

2-s2.0-85089411895