December 5, 2023

As part of the World Soil Day focus on the importance of healthy soil and advocating for the sustainable management of soil resources, we are pleased to release a series of five new research reports – all of which are available as summaries and full reports on our reports page.

All five of these reports have soil as the focus and investigate best practices for soil sampling in agricultural carbon market programs, like Eco-Harvest, to reduce sampling costs while increasing data certainty. Thank you to the many partners who collaborated on, and funded, this work – including Our Sci LLC, EarthOptics, Environmental Defense Fund, General Mills, Foundation for Food & Agriculture Research, & Yale Center for Natural Carbon Capture. Here’s a quick run-down of topics.

⚫ Testing the Feasibility of Quantifying Change in Agricultural Soil Carbon Stocks through Empirical Sampling: explores the debate about whether regenerative farming practices can effectively store more organic carbon in soil, which is important for combating climate change (published in Geoderma in December 2023).

🔴 Analysis of the Frequency of Bulk Density vs. Soil Organic Carbon Samples for Soil Carbon Programs: provides significant insights into the design of future soil carbon quantification plans and policies.

🔵 Determining Optimal Sample Size Using Power Analysis: explores strategies to optimize the density of soil sampling processes.

⚪ Evaluation of Ospats+ Stratification Methodology: reviews several stratification methods for soil sampling.

⚫ Field Buffer Size Analysis Report: identifies a solution for determining the appropriate size for a field buffer within an automated stratification framework.