Soil Carbon Sequestration Under Bioenergy Crops in Poland

Abstract

Agriculture practices have an important role to play in mitigating climate change due to atmospheric enrichment of carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases (GHG). Land management can strongly influence soil carbon stocks and careful management can be used to sequestered soil carbon. It is important to propose contemporary management practises to farming, like the conversion from a tillage system to no-tillage, incorporation of cover crops and forages in the crop rotation, use of crop residues and biosolids e.g. mulch, implementation of biocrops, as well as integrated nutrient management which including compost/manures as well as the precision use of fertilizers and integrated pest management. Sustainable management in agriculture should reduce and avoid the introduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) to the atmosphere, which is one of three most prevalent GHGs directly emitted by human activity. CO2 is the most important anthropogenic GHG, and according to IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (2007), anthropogenic CO2 emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004. Carbon sequestration is a process through which agricultural and forestry practices remove carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere into a form that does not affect atmospheric chemistry (Lal, 2004a). A natural way to trap atmospheric CO2 is by photosynthesis, where carbon dioxide is absorbed by plants and turned into carbon compounds, stored or fixed C as soil organic carbon (SOC). The SOC pool consist litter, humads and humus, which it is comprised of mixtures of plant and animal residues at various stages of decomposition along with microbial by-products (Lal, 2004a). Agriculture is responsible for 13.5% of global anthropogenic GHG emissions (IPCC, 2007), but if sustainable land management practices are implemented, agricultural soils could become a carbon sink (Dumanski et al., 1998). There are five principal global carbon pools. The oceanic pool (38 Gt) is the largest, followed by the geologic (5 Gt), pedologic (2.5 Gt), biotic (0.56 Gt), and the atmospheric pool (0.76 Gt). The soils beneath the oceans are the most important reservoir of carbon in the terrestrial biosphere and contain three times the amount as compared with those that are found in vegetation (Lal, 2004b; SEC, 2009). Soils contain more than twice the carbon that can be found in the atmosphere and the loss of carbon from soils can have a significant effect on atmospheric CO2 concentrations, which can influence the climate (Smith, 2008). Many studies have examined the sequestration potential in agriculture and forestry in Europe (Smith et al., 1997; Smith et al., 2000; Vleeshouwers & Verhagen, 2002; Freibauer et al., 2004;