To ensure food security for the world’s burgeoning population and to cope with limited fossil fuel supplies, it is essential to understand how resource-limited farmers can manage soil quality. Because of its key role in soil fertility and agricultural productivity, it is essential to understand land management and agricultural practices that enhance soil carbon. Collaboration with the U.S. partner's NSF-funded long-term ecological research site for row crop agriculture affords the opportunity to address a knowledge gap, through a unique opportunity to revisit more than 1,000 soil sites in Malawi where soil carbon was quantified at multiple depths in the 1990s. 

 

Examining patterns and controls of soil organic carbon storage is critical to understanding ecosystem processes and its feedbacks to the atmospheric composition, rate of climate change, soil fertility, and agricultural production. Carbon credits have been proposed as one way to support African farmers while achieving soil conservation goals and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but there is a void of knowledge concerning soil carbon status on smallholder fields. Furthermore, spatio-temporal patterns of soil carbon aggradation or degradation across African agricultural landscapes remain one of the largest unknowns in food security policy planning. The goal of the project was to understand soil carbon spatio-temporal patterns and processes in Malawi and explore the impact of agricultural land management as it relates to food productivity in the country. This data gathered and analyzed and the capacity building for Malawian participants directly address key development priorities, including promoting food security and improving land productivity.

Final Summary of Project Activities

The research team excavated soil samples from a variety of sites and archived some for future use. In collaboration with the Forest Research Institute of Malawi, researchers undertook a continual chemical and carbon analysis of the soil samples,

Due to the insufficiency of the country coverage in the excavations, only the available baseline data was used to come up with soil maps of Malawi, as this data had a larger coverage. The team also interviewed farmers at soil excavation sites and two Master’s students in environmental science finalized their dissertations during the project period.