Monitoring farmland interventions for carbon capture and nature recovery

This project will create a long-term baseline monitoring program to capture data to evaluate the effectiveness of newly-implemented sustainable farmland practices for carbon capture and nature recovery. The project will gather data from various sources to find the most reliable and cost-effective ways to measure these impacts, even when funding is tight. The focus is on understanding how soil carbon and biodiversity improve when moving from traditional farming to more regenerative methods. The project will  work with partners to combine data on soil health with data on insect biodiversity gathered by researchers, community groups,  charities and the public. The goal is to provide guidance on the best ways to track progress in nature recovery projects.

Project lead: David Johnson

Project collaborators: Chris Walsh (Kindling Farm), Elina-Marielle Doss (Merseyside Biobank and Merseyside Environmental Advisory Service), Anna Gilchrist (University of Manchester)

Findings

The importance of integrating measures of biodiversity and soil carbon pools spatially; The need to have robust, simple to understand protocols for measuring biodiversity and soil carbon pools so that subsequent assays of the site will be as consistent as possible; Radical change in farmland management practices will impact important metrics (such as soil C) in the longer term and so having a clear set of protocols and understanding of these processes set out from the outset is important to ensure stakeholders remain committed, enthusiastic and optimistic.

Suggestions for further research

Synthesising impacts of farmland management across myriad contexts such as soil types; cropping systems; climate. There is unlikely to be a single relationship between eg above and below ground biodiversity so it is important to draw general patterns that capture distinct contexts.