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DIVISION S-8—NUTRIENT MANAGEMENT & SOIL & PLANT ANALYSIS

Assessment of a Method to Measure Temporal Change in Soil Carbon Storage

Agriculture & Agri-Food Canada Research Centre, P.O. Box 3000, Lethbridge, AB, Canada T1J 4B1

* Corresponding author (ellert{at}em.agr.ca)

Sensitive methods are essential to resolve small changes in soil C storage, such as those attained in sequestration projects, against much larger quantities of C already present. To measure temporal changes in C storage we proposed a high-resolution method based on collecting volumetric soil cores from a microsite (4 by 7 m), marking core locations to intersperse multiple cores collected initially and in a subsequent sampling year, rigorous analytical quality control, and calculating soil C pool sizes with proper corrections for unequal soil masses. To evaluate the method, we measured the recovery of 3.64 Mg C ha^-1 added as coal dust to microsites. We calculated C stored in successive soil layers of both fixed volume and equivalent mass. We inferred coal C recovery from spatial comparisons between coal-amended and unamended plots, and from temporal comparisons between soil samples collected before and after coal addition. The comparisons among C storage showed effective recovery of added coal C, but only for paired temporal differences based on calculations of organic C storage in an equivalent soil mass. With spatial comparisons, coal C became undetectable when soil thickness exceeded 35 cm. With temporal comparisons, coal C recovery ranged from 91 to 106%, provided differences were calculated for successively thicker layers of equivalent soil mass. In contrast, recovery was only 64 to 82% when temporal differences were calculated for layers of fixed soil volume. The method is useful to quantify small temporal changes in soil organic C storage within microsites, and possibly over more extensive areas with sufficient samples to characterize spatial variability.

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