New Method Has Promise for Accurate, Efficient Soil Carbon Estimates

August 2, 2023

UIUC iSEE News: To monitor and sustainably manage soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks under agricultural land use, an accurate way to measure SOC is essential. However, current methods of accurately estimating SOC are resource- and cost-intensive. In their new study, published in Geoderma, Agroecosystem Sustainability Center (ASC) researchers led by C3.ai DTI climate researcher Kaiyu Guan tested a new sampling method in hopes of improving the ability to estimate SOC stocks.

“Quantifying soil carbon stock through soil sampling is a hard and expensive task, but our approach was found to reduce the number of soil samples needed by a very promising 30 percent,” said Guan.