Institut für Pflanzenbau und Bodenkunde
Soils of agricultural ecosystems can contribute to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and thus to climate protection through increased carbon sequestration. In order to be able to assess this potential and promote it by adapting land use systems, as well as to localize adaptation needs on an area-specific basis, up-to-date, area-wide and high-resolution information on the carbon content of agricultural soils is required. Germany-wide, high-resolution maps of the carbon content of agricultural soils are currently only available with a spatial resolution of 250 m² to 1 km². The maps are not suitable as a basis for large-scale analyses. In addition, the maps do not contain quality measures that are important for communicating model uncertainties and application limitations. The goal of the KoBoS project is to develop an extensible "open source" model for scale-specific prediction of topsoil carbon contents. The result will be digital maps of topsoil carbon content of agricultural soils with uncertainty measures for different scale ranges and spaces in Germany. The maps and underlying input data or modeling results are provided as web services, contain all information on the "geodata life cycle" and are published on a data repository. The map products can be understood as basic indicators to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of humus-forming measures or humus-reducing activities, taking into account model uncertainties. Due to the "open source" character of the underlying models, input data and modeling results as well as the standardization of the model accuracy measures, the results are comparable, scalable and dynamically extensible.
Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture
