Soil carbon losses could be nearly equal to total emissions from deforestation

Soil carbon losses could be nearly equal to total emissions from deforestation. The study led by Dr. Jonathan Sanderman of the Woods Hole Research Center and Dr. Tom Hengl of ISRIC published in PNAS shows that agricultural land uses in the past 12,000 years of human land use could have resulted in the loss of 133 Pg C from the soil. This research is based on ISRIC's global compilation of soil organic carbon data (part of the data is available publicly via the WoSIS web service) and the History Database of the Global Environment (HYDE) land use data. The produced data and attached Rcode used generate predictions is available publicly. Read more in:

Sanderman, J., Hengl, T., Fiske, G (2017) The soil carbon debt of 12,000 years of human land use. PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.1706103114