While we're on the subject of pyramids, Charley Orchard at Landekg.com has made a useful diagram of what makes monitoring valuable. Click the image to go to the May 2011 Land EKG newsletter explaining it.

A 32-day Landsat EVI composite image from Google Earth Engine showing San Juan Bautista, California, from April 7 to May 9, 2010. The town is at upper left. The tan-colored areas, upper center, are farm fields. The darker green areas on the bottom are pasture lands and woodland.

Google Earth Engine is offering 8- and 32-day Landsat Enhanced Vegetation Index and Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) composites, plus other satellite data, processed and available in a Google Maps type of interface:

http://earthengine.googlelabs.com

Click on Data Catalog, open in workspace. This will open a Google Map window of the earth. Zoom into the area of interest using the + and - bars on navigation tool and then select a date range on the slider in the left hand pane. You may need to wait for the imagery to load. Landsat pixels are 30 meters on a side.

To refer back to the underlying terrain map in order to orient yourself, you can toggle the + or - box on the upper left corner of the EVI imagery box.

The Earth Engine team at Google expects that they will be able to offer longer time periods or user-specified date ranges on some of this data, and an easier interface, later this year, as well as an interface for web developers.

This data can already show some striking contrasts in solar energy flow into the biosphere, and will be a powerful tool for showing and monitoring the effects of large-scale policy, such as USDA commodity subsidies or the Conservation Reserve Program, as well as the effects of management decisions at the 40-acre scale.

At long last Measuring soil carbon change: a flexible, practical, local method is available for download, review, and use. About 2 megabytes, pdf.

It is intended as a guide for do-it-yourselfers as well as part of the operating method for the Soil Carbon Challenge. It is also the first guide that attempts to understand and accommodate the variety of purposes or objectives people have in measuring soil carbon. Up to now, soil carbon measurement has been treated almost exclusively as a technical issue. But the main sources of risk and uncertainty in achieving the objectives are social, having to do with beliefs and attitudes.

Based on published literature and experience, this method outlines how to establish fixed plots, take samples, get them analyzed with the dry combustion method, and make calculations from the results.

Though targeted primarily at those who want to show possibility, and get feedback for their management, the guide should be helpful for those who wish to quantify carbon tonnage for "offsets" or research projects as well. How and what you measure, as well as the sources of uncertainty, depend on your purpose.

Measuring carbon change means establishing and measuring baseline plots, and then remeasuring them after 3 years or so.

Depending on the intensity and depths needed, I can establish and measure 4 baseline plots for US$1000 plus travel. Contact Peter (info at soilcarboncoalition dot org) for details.

In general, statistical accuracy increases with the square root of sample size. Doubling your sensitivity and accuracy quadruples your cost. It's a power law, not a normal distribution, and it pushes us toward extremes.

In measuring soil carbon using traditional sampling, what this means is that the high achievers are easiest and cheapest to measure (circled red in the diagram below). A sampling scheme that is adequate for measuring a large change in soil carbon between an initial baseline and resampling, may not yield a significant result if the change turns out to be small.

Measurement will thus tend to highlight the more successful strategies, and the more motivated and successful managers.

Seth Godin, author of the book TRIBES, writes, "there is no tribe of normal. People don't coalesce into active and committed tribes around the status quo."

Attached below is a simple draft greenhouse gas calculator for grass and cattle producers, in Microsoft Excel format. This calculator differs from many in that it recognizes that soil, and soil biology, is a principal factor influencing the composition of the atmosphere. To judge or quantify such effects, site-specific measurements are needed, such as changes in soil carbon levels over time.

The promise of a calculator is that you can assess your consumption of resources, or your impact, and presumably be motivated to reduce it. However, the world is not just an input-output system, or collection of sinks and sources. There are complex interdependencies, flows, and cycles. When people say that it takes a village to raise a child, they do not mean that a village is destroyed for every child raised. There can be synergy, mutual benefit. Likewise for the water, solar energy, and carbon that goes into life processes. They are not destroyed.

However, there seems to be popular demand, and this draft calculator is a response to that demand, and an effort to enlarge perceptions of the interdependencies.

For most grass-based cattle producers, the major fluxes of greenhouse gases are likely to be methane from enteric fermentation, and changes in soil carbon levels.

The calculator comes preloaded with fictitious figures based on a 10,000 acre property, with 600 cow-calf pairs, that ships 800-pound yearlings.

Suggestions welcome.

RANGE magazine has a good article by Chris Gill and Allan Savory.

http://www.rangemagazine.com/features/fall-09/fa09-what_works.pdf

Dr Christine Jones keynote presentation at the 2008 Queensland Landcare Conference, "Sustainability by Design", September 22, 2008, at Monto, Queensland, Australia. For more video visit www.qldlandcareconference.com. Camera by Beryl and Cec Bleys, Monto History Centre. Video and Web Production by eco2oh and THINKeEXTENSION.

Christine Jones has spent 20 years working on the soil carbon opportunity. She is the founder of ASCAS, the Australian Soil Carbon Accreditation Scheme.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Says Prof. Ross Garnaut in Australia, who heads an independent commission on climate change commissioned by Australia's Commonwealth, State and Territory Governments:

"I don't think it's impossible to measure either the carbon in soils - the increase in carbon - or the vegetation on properties. It is going to be much easier if groups of farmers within a region band together so that you reduce overall costs in that way. But in the end we're going to need to develop satellite imaging, remote sensing and other new tech ways of measuring these things so we can get the costs down." He says scientific work on measurement 'should be given very high priority'. "The opportunity in the Australian countryside is very large."

http://carboncoalitionoz.blogspot.com/2008/09/soil-carbon-credits-as-soo...

How do you measure or estimate soil carbon?

Here are some handbooks

1. Peter Donovan. Measuring soil carbon change: a flexible, practical, local method. 2010. A basic guide for do-it-yourselfers and the method for the Soil Carbon Challenge. Includes planning worksheet and plot data sheets.

2. Pearson, Timothy, Sarah Walker, and Sandra Brown. 2006. Sourcebook for Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry Projects. Winrock International.
http://www.winrock.org/ecosystems/files/Winrock-BioCarbon_Fund_Sourceboo... (661 K pdf file; right click and "save link as" to download)

Winrock also has a sampling cost calculator available from
http://www.winrock.org/ecosystems/tools.asp

3. Stolbovoy, V., Montanarella, L., Filippi, N., Jones, A., Gallego, J., and Grassi, G. 2007. Soil sampling protocol to certify the changes of organic carbon stock in mineral soil of the European Union. Version 2. European Commission, Joint Research Centre. ISBN 978-92-79-05379-5
http://eusoils.jrc.ec.europa.eu/esdb_archive/eusoils_docs/other/EUR21576...

summary poster:
http://eusoils.jrc.it/ESDB_Archive/eusoils_docs/Poster/Soil_Sampling.pdf

4. McKenzie, N., Ryan, P., Fogarty, P., and Wood, J. 2000. Sampling, measurement, and analytical protocols for carbon estimation in soil, litter, and coarse woody debris. Australian Greenhouse Office, Technical Report 14.
http://www.greenhouse.gov.au/ncas/reports/tr14final.html

5. Harnessing Farms and Forests in the Low Carbon Economy: How to create, measure, and verify greenhouse gas offsets edited by Zach Willey and Bill Chameides, Duke University Press, 2007.

Christine Jones published an article in the Australian Farm Journal that may help to explain why the assumption is widespread among agricultural scientists that soil carbon cannot be increased quickly. The Roth C model, for example, ignores the role of mycorrhizal soluble carbon, focusing entirely on biomass input for humification:

"When carbon enters the soil ecosystem as plant material (such as crop stubble), it decomposes and returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Hence the lamentation 'my soil eats mulch', familiar to home gardeners and broadacre croppers alike. While plant residues are important for soil food-web function, reduced evaporative demand and the buffering of soil temperatures, they do not necessarily lead to increased levels of stable soil carbon.

"Conversely, soluble carbon streaming into the soil ecosystem via the cytoplasm of mycorrhizal fungi can be rapidly stabilised by humification and permanently retained in soil, provided appropriate land management systems are in place."

The three individual pages of this article are attached below.