Modelling carbon responses to land management in Mediterranean forests and agricultural systems: insights from Greece

Forest and agricultural systems represent major reservoirs of terrestrial carbon and play a key role in the carbon balance of Mediterranean landscapes. Their capacity to sequester carbon in both soils and biomass is highly sensitive to land management and disturbance regimes. However, the soil organic carbon (SOC) response to management practices in these systems remains highly uncertain. Accurate mechanistic modelling of SOC dynamics and validation under different forest and agricultural management scenarios are essential to support national and EU climate policies.

We used the state-of-the-art biogeochemical ecosystem model DayCent to simulate SOC stocks and total biomass in Mediterranean agricultural and forest soils at national scale in Grreece. The modelling framework builds on extensive validation of SOC dynamics in agricultural soils, whereas model evaluation in forests soils remains constrained by the lack of long-term field observations of management and disturbance histories. To address this limitation and evaluate model performance in forest soils, we used publicly available field observations from forest sites in Greece combined with spatial datasets of biomass and SOC stocks. Soil organic carbon dynamics were simulated at the 0-30 cm depth. We applied the model under a set of land management scenarios to assess their effects on SOC dynamics and total biomass. This work provides a promising framework to assess carbon sequestration potential of different land management practices in Mediterranean agricultural and forest soils and supports policy-relevant assessments of carbon dynamics.