Impact of crop rotations on soil organic carbon content

Increasing carbon storage in soils is one way of mitigating and adapting to climate change. Carbon sequestration in agricultural soils through improved management is particularly interesting because of its low costs and multiple co-benefits on soil quality. Soil organic carbon (SOC) content is the most important indicator of soil quality, acting as an agent for physical and biochemical soil properties, and fundamentally determines the fertility of soils.

Annual changes in SOC stocks are small compared to a large amount of C present in the soil and are difficult to measure, particularly in short timescales. Long-term field trials and repeated soil inventories, where changes in SOC have accumulated over decades, are therefore valuable to estimate these changes in response to land use and management.

Detailed soil surveys were conducted on this farm in 1956, 1984 and 2001 (Kätterer et al. 2004 https://doi.org/10.1023/B:FRES.0000048481.34439.71). Now, we intend to resample the same locations within the fields on this farm to quantify changes in soil carbon that may have occurred during the last 23 years and evaluate how recent land management relates to these changes.  

This project will include soil sampling on the farm, reconstruction of crop rotations and crop yields per field from the farmer’s records. The soil samples will be analysed in a commercial lab. The student will analyse the data and write a thesis. Soil sampling should preferably be done in September, but April would also be possible. Thus, March or August would be the best time to start the MSc project.

This MSc-project will be supervised by Dr. Rong Lang at the Department of Ecology at SLU. Examiner will be Prof. Thomas Kätterer. We expect the thesis to be written in English.