CARBOCREDIT

Verification system for determining the effects of farming practices on carbon sequestration

In the CARBOCREDIT project, we developed the carbon sequestration verification system for fields to determine the effects of farming practices on carbon sequestration. A system for verifying grassland vegetation and soil carbon sequestration was developed in the Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer (PEcAn) -platform. The platform combines carbon cycle calculation models, various measurements for the use of models and analysis of results, and mathematical methods. The BASGRA_N model (Höglind et al. 2020) was used as the starting point for calculating the carbon cycle of grasslands and the BASGRA-BGC model (Huang et al. 2020) was used for peatlands. The BASGRA_N model was added with the possibility to use the Yasso15 and Yasso20 models of the Finnish Meteorological Institute as soil descriptive elements.

To illustrate the verification system, the Field Observatory online service, Nevalainen et al. pre-print was developed to show the carbon-related activities automatically in real-time at the project’s research fields in Qvidja and Ruukki, as well as at 20 intensively researched Carbon Action farms.

Verification of carbon sequestration is essential to make carbon units available to society and industry for climate work in the private and public sectors. At the same time, new information was collected in this project on the determination and management of emissions of two other important greenhouse gases, methane, and nitrous oxide, and on the effects of cultivation measures.