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Surface soil organic carbon sequestration under post agricultural grasslands offset by net loss at depth

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Abstract

Post agricultural grasslands are thought to accumulate soil organic carbon (SOC) after cultivation cessation. The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the U.S. is a wide-scale, covering approximately 8.9 Mha as of 2020, example of row-crop to grassland conversion. To date, changes in SOC stock in CRP lands have mostly been evaluated at local scales and focused on the surface 20–30 cm of the soil profile. Thus, we lack knowledge of SOC dynamics in CRP lands on a continental scale, especially in the subsurface soil, after agricultural cessation. The Rapid Carbon Assessment (RaCA) project is the most recent effort by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to systematically quantify C stock in the 0–100 cm soil profile across the conterminous US. Here we analyzed data from RaCA to evaluate the SOC stocks of both surface and subsurface soil of the CRP on a continental scale. We found there was no difference in SOC stock between croplands and CRP lands when comparing the 0–100 cm soil profiles, which indicates that the C sequestration in CRP lands is insignificant overall. We did find that CRP lands have higher SOC stocks in the surface soil (0–5 cm). However, such higher SOC levels in surface (0–5 cm) soil were offset by the lower SOC stock in the subsurface (30–100 cm) of the CRP. We also found that CRP lands in humid and warm regions may have net soil C sequestration because they have much more SOC in the surface as compared with croplands in the same regions. Whether the lower SOC in the subsurface of CRP lands is caused by legacy effects or is a result of C losses needs to be verified by long-term repeated sampling in both surface and subsurface soil. This analysis highlights the importance of examining C dynamics in subsurface soil after agricultural cessation to accurately measure and improve C sequestration rates in CRP lands.

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Availability of data and material

The original data from the RaCA project can be downloaded at https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/soils/survey/?cid=nrcs142p2_054164

Code availability

The R code for the data analysis is available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The work was accomplished using the Special Funds from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. We thank all the staff at USDA-NRCS Soil Science Division that were involved in the RaCA project, without whom this study would not have been possible. We thank Skye Wills for the leadership of the RaCA program. Dave Wedin, Chad Brassil, and Sheri Fritz made helpful comments that improved the manuscript greatly.

Funding

This study was supported by the Special Funds from the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biological Sciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 402 Manter Hall, Lincoln, NE, 68588-0118, USA

    Yi Yang

  2. Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory, Colorado State University, 1231 East Dr., Fort Collins, CO, 80523-1499, USA

    Yi Yang

  3. Kansas Biological Survey, University of Kansas, 2101 Constant Dr., Lawrence, KS, 66047, USA

    Terrance Loecke

  4. Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Health and Environmental Sciences, Suzhou, 215123, Jiangsu, China

    Johannes M. H. Knops

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  1. Yi Yang
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  2. Terrance Loecke
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the conception and design of the study. Data analyses were performed by YY and TL. The first draft of the manuscript was written by YY and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Terrance Loecke.

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Yang, Y., Loecke, T. & Knops, J.M.H. Surface soil organic carbon sequestration under post agricultural grasslands offset by net loss at depth. Biogeochemistry 159, 303–313 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10533-022-00929-5

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