Managing Soil Organic Carbon for Climate Change Mitigation - Multiscale Quantification Through Remote Sensing, AI and Biogeochemical Models - Part II

Workshop Overview:

The overall goal of this KISS study on “Managing Soil Organic Carbon for Climate Change Mitigation“ is to envision a state-of-the-art, big data & model platform, that is both distributed and community-based, and that can serve as a foundation for high quality-low cost quantification and analyses of soil carbon and soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural land use, across scales from farm- to national-level. Development and implementation of this technology is critical to enable agricultural soils to play a significant role in CO2 removal and to reduce non-CO2 GHG emissions from soils.

The first workshop identified critical elements of such a platform and reviewed the current state-of-the-art for several key technologies. We convened an expert group of scientists to capture their collective expertise and diverse viewpoints, in order to converge towards a unified systems approach to achieve high quality-low cost quantification.

The objectives for workshop #2 will be to address technical challenges and identify opportunities for moving forward on each of four critical components:

1. tailored, multi-scale remote sensing data systems of land surface characteristics and land use activities,
2. process-based and hybrid AI models to predict soil carbon stock changes and soil GHG emissions,
3. optimal ground-based monitoring and experimental site networks, and
4. systems integration.

A key outcome of our workshop will be to enhance our collective understanding of how these individual elements, with their respective enhancements, can be synergistically employed to fully capture the complex processes that contribute to the sequestration of carbon in soils and to the reduction of GHG emissions, aiming for near carbon neutrality in agriculture in the foreseeable future. A key outcome of this workshop will be the assessment of the technical hurdles inherent to each component and to clearly design a forward path that incorporates feasibility assessments, technological advancements and considering strategic investments.