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Measuring and modelling soil carbon stocks and stock changes in livestock production systems - Guidelines for assessment. Version 1










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    Document
    Measuring and modelling soil carbon stocks and stock changes in livestock production systems - Guidelines for assessment (Draft for public review)
    Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership
    2018
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    Measuring and modelling soil carbon stocks and stock changes in livestock production systems
    Summary of the guidelines for assessment
    2019
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    Grazed livestock production systems are an integral part of the cultural, social and economic identity of many nations worldwide. Key agricultural commodities such as milk and meat come from ruminant (cud-chewing) animals, predominantly cows, goats and sheep. Soil properties, particular soil organic matter (SOM) content, may be affected directly when livestock graze on grassland; pastures and/or rangelands or indirectly when land is used for feed crop production. SOM content is measured as density of soil organic carbon (SOC). Indeed, there is a strong negative correlation between land use intensity and SOC. The focus of these guidelines is on measuring and modelling SOC stocks, as well as monitoring SOC changes in response to management practices in grasslands and rangelands. The methodology strives to increase understanding of carbon sequestration and to facilitate improvement of livestock systems’ environmental performance. A set of methods and approaches are recommended to be used by individual farmers, pastoralist, or land managers, or by those undertaking life cycle assessment studies, policy makers or regulators at local, regional or national scales.
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    Book (stand-alone)
    Measuring and modelling soil carbon stocks and stock changes in livestock production systems – A scoping analysis for the LEAP work stream on soil carbon stock changes 2019
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    In order to build consensus on methods to measure and model soil carbon stocks and stock changes, the Steering Committee of the Livestock Environmental Assessment and Performance (LEAP) Partnership mandated a task force to develop this scoping analysis and pave the way towards the formation of the LEAP Tecnical Advisory Group on soil carbon stock changes. Soil carbon sequestration and storage in grasslands offers a significant potential to compensate for GHG emissions from livestock, but the lack of consensus on the appropriate methodologies to account for soil carbon stock changes hinders robust and standardized assessments. In this report, we reviewed several published soil organic carbon (SOC) models, and evaluated their aptitude to combine them with life cycle assessments (LCAs). Among contentious issues, the most relevant are: a) the lack of universal models, b) the uneven data availability, comparability and quality between countries and regions, and c) the difficulty to match measurable SOC fractions with those determined by the models. Taking this into account, a tiered approach is proposed, according to the availability of original data to run the models. The use of IPCC carbon (C) accounting system appears to be the simplest approach suitable to countries with scarcity of original C data. Conversely, more complex models such as Century (Parton 1987, 1988) or Roth C (Smith 1998) are likely to perform better and give less uncertainty when original input data are easily available.

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