Massive Rangeland Carbon Sequestration Opportunities May Hinge on Urban Compost Just as San Francisco has made commercial and residential composting mandatory and other cities are considering doing so, a worldchanging application for using compost to dramatically increase carbon sequestration in suburban grasslands has been confirmed by the Marin Carbon Project. Soil carbon sequestration is the process of moving greenhouse-gas causing CO2 from the atmosphere into the soil. After the ocean, soil is the second largest pool of carbon on the planet, with twice the amount of carbon that is in the atmosphere, according to Whendee Silver, a biogeochemist and professor at University of California at Berkeley. Healthy grasslands, which make up 30% of global land and 50% of land in California, put a lot of carbon into roots to lock in nutrients, Silver said. The Marin Carbon Projects research is focused on how to increase that natural carbon sequestering process, or restore it, in the case of damaged rangelands. Silver and others presented the results of research last night that the Marin Carbon Project has been conducting at about two dozen sites in rural West Marin County, about 45 miles north of San Francisco. Read more: commoncurrent/notes/2009/12/massive-rangeland-carbon-seque.html
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 00:21:39 +0000
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