Monday 3 August 2020

New £1m project launched to monitor soil carbon changes for UK farmers

A new £1 million research project has been launched by the James Hutton Institute to provide scientists, policymakers and farmers with a better understanding of soil carbon changes in the UK.

The plan is to use remote-controlled ground-based sensors and computing to create a system to monitor, report and verify changes in soil carbon and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in near real-time.

This will then be available to users through a mobile app and will help scientists and policymakers understand and predict environmental changes.

Dr Jagadeesh Yeluripati, Principal Investigator of this project within the Institute’s Information and Computational Sciences Department, commented: “There is a need to combine information from diverse sensor networks in different environments and to accurately model soil carbon changes and GHG emissions from various management practices."

The scientific team notes the project could support the net zero targets for Scotland in 2045 and the rest of the UK in 2050.

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