Background:

On the way to reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, storage of carbon in agricultural soils is considered to be of great potential. However, carbon stocks in arable soils in Germany have declined continuously over the past years. The trend towards less diverse crop rotations is an important driver of this decline. In order to making better use of carbon storage potentials without compromising crop productivity, it is crucial to identify site-specific optimized crop rotations adapted to local soil and climate conditions, cropping systems and management practices. In doing so, cropping systems must improve their overall climate balance, i.e., taking into account crop-specific GHG emissions from seed, fertilizer, diesel consumption, and nitrous oxide emissions, while ensuring food security.

Objectives:

The KlimaFFolgen project will conduct a Germany-wide potential analysis on the contribution of improved crop rotations to carbon sequestration in agricultural soils. Based on land use information from remote sensing data, process-based soil and crop modeling, and coupled life cycle assessment, a plot-specific decision support system (DSS) for crop rotation design will be developed and made available to users in agriculture.