Agriculturally induced erosion in what is now the Calhoun Experimental Forest, South Carolina (photo from U.S. Forest Service)
| In recent years, the paradigm of soil erosion being an important source of CO2 to the atmosphere has been questioned. Investigators have demonstrated that soil erosion and the dynamic replacement of soil organic carbon (SOC) at the eroding site can result in a net sink of CO2. In 2010, we built a model that permits users to compute the extent to which any eroding soil profile serves as a net sink or source of CO2, given the profile’s original SOC content. Presentation of the Soil Organic Carbon Erosion, Replacement, and Oxidation (SOrCERO) model can be found in Billings et al. 2010, an article in Global Biogeochemical Cycles. In 2019, we published an article in Frontiers in Earth Science that describes the inclusion of a depositional site module in the model (SOrCERODe). In 2020 we developed the R script that allows the user to explore both erosional and depositional features. |