Current projects
Current projects focus on:
- Quantifying soil carbon stocks for New Zealand’s agricultural soils under different land uses, with particular emphasis on the extent and protection of vulnerable organic soils.
- Mechanistic understanding of the processes of soil carbon formation, stabilisation and persistence in New Zealand’s soils.
- Investigating the potential of increased plant species diversity (including trees) in pasture ecosystems for increasing soil carbon and reducing nitrous oxide emissions and nitrogen leaching, using novel measurement systems.
Future focus
In the future, this research priority area will continue its focus on plant species diversity to reduce the environmental impacts and increase resilience of agriculture, increasingly incorporating trees. Field research in this area supports process-based modelling in our work on greenhouse gas mitigation, and feeds into spatial upscaling activities in climate-smart landscapes.
Support
Support for our work comes from the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), the New Zealand Agricultural Greenhouse Gas Research Centre (NZAGRC), and a series of Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Endeavour funds, including the recently concluded ‘Reducing nitrogen losses from farms’ and the newly-funded ‘Trees in the landscape’.
