European-scale evidence of farm management impacts on soil organic carbon stocks

It is becoming increasingly evident that one-size-fits-all solutions are rare when it comes to enhancing soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks in agricultural soils. Instead, context-specific management recommendations are needed, guided by a detailed understanding of how different management practices interact with environmental factors, such as climate or soil type, to affect SOC stocks. Since it is impossible to test all such combinations in controlled experiments, using large datasets of on-farm data is a promising alternative. Here, we predicted crop-specific management for all sample locations of the European wide soil monitoring of SOC in agricultural soils (LUCAS Soil, n = 8,834 repeat samples from the years 2009, 2015 and 2018) using individual farm management data representatively surveyed yearly for all EU + UK regions (n = 82,000 farms per year). We will present results of how relevant agricultural practices, including crop rotation diversity, cropping intensity, fertilizer use, fertilizer type, organic farming and tillage intensity, impact SOC stocks at the European scale. In addition, the large sample size and coverage of extensive environmental gradients allows disentangling the effect of management and environmental drivers on SOC stocks. We expect that these results provide a more nuanced view of how management impacts SOC under various soil and climatic conditions, contributing to the development of context-specific management recommendations to increase SOC stocks in agricultural soils.