The Impact of Agricultural Soil Erosion on the Global Carbon Cycle

• Autor(a) principal: Van Oost, K.
• Data de Publicação: 2007
• Outros Autores: Quine, T. A., Govers, G., De Gryze, S., Six, J., Harden, J. W., Ritchie, J. C., McCarty, G. W., Heckrath, G., Kosmas, C., Giraldez, J. V., Marques da Silva, José Rafael, Merckx, R.
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositórios Científicos de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (RCAAP)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10174/3147; https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1145724
• topic: Global Carbon cycle; Agricultural soil erosion

Agricultural soil erosion is thought to perturb the global carbon cycle, but estimates of its effect range from a source of 1 petagram per year−1 to a sink of the same magnitude. By using caesium-137 and carbon inventory measurements from a large-scale survey, we found consistent evidence for an erosion-induced sink of atmospheric carbon equivalent to approximately 26% of the carbon transported by erosion. Based on this relationship, we estimated a global carbon sink of 0.12 (range 0.06 to 0.27) petagrams of carbon per year−1 resulting from erosion in the world’s agricultural landscapes. Our analysis directly challenges the view that agricultural erosion represents an important source or sink for atmospheric CO2.