NSF EPSCoR: Quantifying Soil Carbon Sequestration Potential of Conservation Management Practices Based on a Multi-scale Data Fusion Approach

Soil organic carbon (SOC) represents a critical driver of agricultural productivity and environmental resilience. Enhancing soil carbon sequestration through land management practices has been identified as a potential viable means to achieve climate mitigation and meanwhile ensure food security and environmental sustainability. However, SOC dynamics are affected by multiple influencing factors, involving both human activities (e.g. land use and management practices) and natural processes (e.g. climate change); these influencing factors tightly couple and interact, resulting in high uncertainties in the estimation of agricultural soil carbon sequestration. The underlying mechanisms responsible for the impacts of land use and management practices and their relationship with highly heterogeneous climate and soil conditions are far from clear. To fill this knowledge gap, in this study, we proposed to use a multi-scale data fusion approach to: 1) quantify the effects of two emerging conservation management practices (i.e., biochar and cover crop) on changes in SOC; 2) identify environmental determinants of changes in SOC under these management practices; and 3) generate time-series global cropland distribution datasets by hybridizing existing satellite-based maps and inventory data.