ARS | Publication request: Carbon sequestration in the agricultural lands of the United States

Submitted to: Technical Report
Publication Type: Other
Publication Acceptance Date: April 13, 2009
Publication Date: May 7, 2009
Citation: Morgan, J.A., Follett, R.F., Allen Jr, L.H., Del Grosso, S.J., Derner, J.D., Dijkstra, F.A., Franzluebbers, A.J., Fry, R., Mccarl, B.A., Mooney, S., Paustian, K., Schoeneberger, M. 2009. Carbon sequestration in the agricultural lands of the United States. Technical Report. pp. 72. 2009.

Technical Abstract: The problem climate change presents to Earth and its inhabitants is increasingly being accepted and clarified by the scientific community. In agriculture, the challenges of climate change include adaptive management to cope with the changing climate, and mitigation strategies to decrease agriculture’s contributions to greenhouse gases (GHGs). Here we discuss the potential role of agriculture in the U.S. to mitigate climate change through the sequestering of carbon (C). A brief overview of several component areas of agriculture are described emphasizing their importance to U.S. agriculture, and management issues for C sequestration and non-CO2 GHG emissions. Critical research needs are identified. National scale analyses of GHG emissions/removals are used for constructing national inventories. The U.S. system for estimating soil emissions at the national level currently utilizes a large suite of USDA and other government agency data sources (e.g. soil maps, climate data, Natural Resources Inventory (NRI), National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS), Economic Research Service (ERS) surveys) to provide data to run Century and DayCent simulation models. Two important issues are developing that will have increasingly important consequences for agricultural C sequestration: biofuels as alternative sources of energy, and climate change, which as it begins to manifest may have significant effects on agriculture’s ability to sequester C and reduce emissions of non-CO2 GHGs.