Enhanced U.S. soil carbon mapping with AI

Apr 04, 2024

By Farms.com

The battle against climate change receives a significant boost from an innovative approach to measuring soil organic carbon. By employing machine learning to analyze extensive soil sample data, scientists have crafted a more precise continental-scale estimate of soil organic carbon in the United States, as reported in the Journal of Geophysical Research — Biogeosciences.

This research underscores soil's pivotal role as a carbon sink and its capacity to impact climate change mitigation efforts. With nearly 50,000 soil samples from various U.S. regions analyzed, the study reveals how different environmental variables, including climate and vegetation, influence soil carbon levels.

The approach not only rectifies inconsistencies in previous estimates but also paves the way for targeted land management strategies that could enhance carbon sequestration. This advancement is crucial for policymakers and land managers striving to implement climate-smart practices.

The collaboration of experts from Emory University, Colorado State University, and several national laboratories, supported by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, marks a significant step toward harnessing the power of soil in climate mitigation efforts.

Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids