2025: Designing a Reliable and Scalable Sampling Strategy for Regional Soil Carbon Stock Monitoring (Environmental Defense Fund)
Abdelkrim Lachgar is an EDF-Cornell Atkinson Postdoctoral Associate. Proactive management of agricultural soils can sequester carbon, build soil health over time, and contribute to climate mitigation, adaptation, and long-term farm viability. Governments and private actors are creating carbon markets to encourage and pay farmers to adopt sustainable management practices, but they’re hampered by difficulties in verifying and quantifying changes in soil carbon levels. Researchers will leverage soil carbon data collected by EDF and collaborators and couple it with data from soil surveys, topography, remote sensing, and land management records to define agricultural management zones and create digital soil mapping. This work aims to optimize strategies for surveying soil carbon and thus improve reliability in carbon markets.
Postdoctoral Associate: Abdelkrim Lachgar
Cornell Advisor: Louis Longchamps (Cornell CALS/Soil and Crop Sciences)
EDF Advisors: Emily Oldfield, Jocelyn Lavalee