Dynamic monitoring, reporting and verification for implementing negative emission strategies in managed ecosystems (RETINA)

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Carbon sequestration in soil is one of the most promising biological negative emission (BNE) technologies to mitigate climate change. Soil carbon sequestration relies on the adoption of best management practices to increase the amount of carbon stored in soil. An advantage of soil carbon sequestration in agriculture is that carbon stocks are most depleted in cropland systems, so there is great potential to capture atmospheric carbon without land use conversion and competition for land resources. The successful implementation of land based negative emission technologies will require continuous monitoring, reporting and verification of soil storage changes and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to estimate net carbon sequestration in soils. Currently, a lack of cost effective, robust, consistent, transparent and accurate methods limits large-scale implementation of these technologies. Monitoring, reporting and verification of carbon sequestration and GHG emissions from soils could be achieved by combining information from novel cost-effective technological developments in field-based sensors, remote sensing, and/or smartphone apps and integration of models on cloud platforms to confirm management practice effectiveness. The process of detecting and inferring soil carbon changes and GHG emissions is extremely data intensive. In order to understand the variability in soil carbon and GHG emissions 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. Here we propose a cloud-based platform that combines new development in sensor-based technologies with cloud-based model simulations to overcome major obstacles for implementing a monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) system for land based negative emission technologies. To operationalize the MRV system, we will collect and process sensor information from the field, land scape level sensors and national scale (Satellite data) and harmonize data feeds to cloud-based models. This setup allows near time simulations on carbon changes and GHG emissions on the cloud without the need for individual user inputs. This project offers the quality data and confidence required for visualising a future, rising to the demands of a net zero carbon UK by 2050. This project will undertake transdisciplinary research to harness recent advances in digital technology combined with novel approaches in stakeholder engagement to make a step change in delivering integrated management options, co-produced with stakeholders, which can help to mitigate climate change. There are several groups who will benefit from the outcomes of this research. We identify various stakeholders and interested groups; UK Farmers will benefit from a freely available mobile-App to help plan various management options to increase/maintain soil organic matter in soil while also accounting for GHG emissions from soil. For policy makers, web-based decision support tool developed in this project will forecast regional estimates of net soil carbon sequestration and GHG emissions. This project could help in designing strategies to monitor and improve environmental quality and reduce GHG emissions from managed ecosystems to meet net zero Britain by 2050. We anticipate wide interest from academia in the GHG budgets and various environmental data sources this project will generate. Keywords: Climate change, soils, carbon sequestration, Greenhouse gas emissions, cloud-based modelling