Current status, uncertainty and future needs in soil carbon monitoring

The need for cataloguing global soil carbon was recently highlighted by Gianelle et al., (2010) in a letter to Science, where the importance of considering soils and SOM sensitivity to temperature were underscored. Moreover the need to understand the global distribution of soil carbon is a real concern for climate change international policy issues. In order to establish the status of our knowledge regarding global soil carbon stocks in relation to climate change problems, an International workshop named G-SCAN (Global Soil Carbon Network) was organized in Florence (20-21, April) by the Edmund Mach Foundation (San Michele All'Adige, Italy). Some of the top scientists working on soil carbon dynamics from Europe and the US discussed the topic according to three working groups: a) Methodological standardization of soil C stocks; b) Detecting changes in Soil C; and c) Long-term experiments. Starting from real situations of soil carbon inventories and databases, the main problems and needs related to monitoring were highlighted and discussed. The results of the workshop will be published soon as an opinion paper in a peer reviewed journal. The unresolved problems still concerning soil carbon monitoring were discussed and could serve as a basis to homogenize current databases, compare soil inventories and improve global soil mapping