LILAS4SOILS Launches New Protocol for Monitoring Soil Carbon Stocks in Mediterranean Farms

LILAS4SOILS uses a Living Labs approach to foster Carbon Farming in the Mediterranean region for the healthy future of European soils.

Living Labs are open innovation ecosystems that engage a wide range of stakeholders and place farmers at the forefront of the transformation of the agricultural sector. LILAS4SOILS Living Labs integrate research and innovation to co-create, test and demonstrate Carbon Farming Practices (CFPs) in 100 farms in six Mediterranean countries across a range of farming systems and different pedoclimatic zones.

CFPs are among the most significant practices that can contribute to healthy soils and a zero-net emissions scenario in the EU agriculture. Carbon Farming encompasses several sustainable agricultural and forestry practices that target the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from soils and enhance carbon storage in soils and biomass.

Besides the positive effects on climate change reduction and soil health, Carbon Farming may become an additional source of income for farmers by enabling the participation in voluntary carbon credit markets in which farmers can be rewarded for applying sustainable farming practices.

To unlock the environmental and economic benefits of carbon farming, it is essential to reliably quantify Soil Organic Carbon (SOC) changes to upscale carbon farming and ensure the long-term validity of carbon credits and related business opportunities. LILAS4SOILS proposes an innovative soil sampling and Monitoring, Reporting and Verifying (MRV) methodology that is mindful of the accuracy-costs trade-offs of MRV and aims to contribute to the current policy debate and standardisation efforts at EU level through the EU Carbon Removals and Carbon Farming (CRCF) Certification Regulation.

LILAS4SOILS Protocol for sampling and data collection (Deliverable D4.1) provides guidelines for selecting the soil sampling design more adequate to the characteristics of the project area (i.e., demo-sites at each Living Lab).

The deliverable includes field and laboratory protocols to measure several soil properties during the project, to assess the effects of CFPs on SOC stocks and other indicators of soil health, soil functions or threats to soil. A single soil sampling design would not be suitable across all sites due to inherent differences between agricultural systems (e.g., cropland, pastures, vineyards, montado or dehesa, olive groves, etc.), degree of spatial variability in soil properties, relief, and management history within the farms, and the type of CFPs implemented at each site.

Considering the technical and financial constraints of any project, LILAS4SOILS proposes a simplified protocol that will allow to estimate temporal changes on SOC stocks at a demo-site caused by the implementation of CFPs while providing a robust estimator of the spatial mean SOC stock.

The sampling protocol has the objectives of providing an unbiased estimator of the average temporal change in SOC stock per intervention area within a demo-site. The first sampling campaign (time 0) will set the baseline SOC stock value per demo-site at each Living Lab prior the implementation of the CFPs.

The sampling strategy should be able to measure changes in SOC stock efficiently in the subsequent sampling times and to represent the spatial variability of the SOC stock in the intervention area, while being cost-effective and easy to implement on the field with the available resources of time and people.

Read the full protocol here.

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