The Impact of Agricultural Soil Erosion on the Global Carbon Cycle

Agricultural soil erosion is thought to perturb the global carbon cycle, but estimates of its effect range from a source of 1 petagram per year–1 to a sink of the same magnitude. By using caesium-137 and carbon inventory measurements from a large-scale survey, we found consistent evidence for an erosion-induced sink of atmospheric carbon equivalent to approximately 26% of the carbon transported by erosion. Based on this relationship, we estimated a global carbon sink of 0.12 (range 0.06 to 0.27) petagrams of carbon per year–1 resulting from erosion in the world's agricultural landscapes. Our analysis directly challenges the view that agricultural erosion represents an important source or sink for atmospheric CO2.

[1]  W. Broecker,et al.  A strategy for estimating the impact of CO2 fertilization on soil carbon storage , 1993 .

[2]  C. Müller,et al.  Modelling the role of agriculture for the 20th century global terrestrial carbon balance , 2007 .

[3]  W. Renwick,et al.  FATES OF ERODED SOIL ORGANIC CARBON: MISSISSIPPI BASIN CASE STUDY , 2005 .

[4]  S. Trimble,et al.  U.S. Soil Erosion Rates--Myth and Reality , 2000, Science.

[5]  M. G. Morgan,et al.  Managing Soil Carbon , 2004, Science.

[6]  Robert W. Buddemeier,et al.  Budgets of soil erosion and deposition for sediments and sedimentary organic carbon across the conterminous United States , 2001 .

[7]  S. Trumbore.  Comparison of carbon dynamics in tropical and temperate soils using radiocarbon measurements , 1993 .

[8]  N. Batjes.  ISRIC-WISE derived soil properties on a 5 by 5 arc-minutes global grid (ver. 1.2) , 2006 .

[9]  Eric A. Davidson,et al.  Changes in soil carbon inventories following cultivation of previously untilled soils , 1993 .

[10]  S. M. Dabney,et al.  Dynamic replacement and loss of soil carbon on eroding cropland , 1999 .

[11]  Ronald Amundson,et al.  The Carbon Budget in Soils , 2001 .

[12]  J. Syvitski,et al.  Impact of Humans on the Flux of Terrestrial Sediment to the Global Coastal Ocean , 2005, Science.

[13]  A. Jarvis.  Hole-field seamless SRTM data, International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) , 2008 .

[14]  R. Lal,et al.  The Depth Distribution of Soil Organic Carbon in Relation to Land Use and Management and the Potential of Carbon Sequestration in Subsoil Horizons , 2005 .

[15]  Johan Six,et al.  Aggregation and soil organic matter accumulation in cultivated and native grassland soils , 1998 .

[16]  Weather Roulette,et al.  Climate , 1858, The Sanitary Review and Journal of Public Health.

[17]  Robert F. Stallard,et al.  Terrestrial sedimentation and the carbon cycle: Coupling weathering and erosion to carbon burial , 1998 .

[18]  Shuguang Liu,et al.  Modeling carbon dynamics in vegetation and soil under the impact of soil erosion and deposition , 2003 .

[19]  D. Schimel,et al.  Geomorphic control of landscape carbon accumulation , 2006 .

[20]  Gerard Govers,et al.  The crop productivity-erosion relationship: an analysis based on experimental work , 2004 .

[21]  J. Boardman.  An average soil erosion rate for Europe: Myth or reality? , 1998 .

[22]  Akihiko Ito,et al.  Simulated impacts of climate and land‐cover change on soil erosion and implication for the carbon cycle, 1901 to 2100 , 2007 .

[23]  J. Harte,et al.  The Significance of the Erosion-induced Terrestrial Carbon Sink , 2006 .

[24]  R. Lal,et al.  Soil erosion and the global carbon budget. , 2003, Environment international.

[25]  J. Ritchie,et al.  Impact of soil movement on carbon sequestration in agricultural ecosystems. , 2002, Environmental pollution.

[26]  K. Van Oost,et al.  Quantifying carbon sequestration as a result of soil erosion and deposition: retrospective assessment using caesium‐137 and carbon inventories , 2007 .

[27]  J. Ritchie.  Carbon content of sediments of small reservoirs , 1989 .

[28]  I. C. Prentice,et al.  Carbon balance of the terrestrial biosphere in the Twentieth Century: Analyses of CO2, climate and land use effects with four process‐based ecosystem models , 2001 .

[29]  Rattan Lal,et al.  A mass balance approach to assess carbon dioxide evolution during erosional events , 2001 .

[30]  K. Paustian,et al.  Acid hydrolysis of easily dispersed and microaggregate‐derived silt‐ and clay‐sized fractions to isolate resistant soil organic matter , 2006 .

[31]  K. Oost,et al.  Landscape‐scale modeling of carbon cycling under the impact of soil redistribution: The role of tillage erosion , 2005 .