A comprehensive framework for evaluating the impact of land use change and management on soil organic carbon stocks in global drylands

Drylands play major roles in the terrestrial carbon cycle and mitigation of climate change. Understanding the dynamics of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks under land use change and management is essential for achieving soil C sequestration through land-based solutions for drylands. In this paper, we briefly reviewed the literature to evaluate the impact of land use change and management on dryland SOC stocks. While the site-level field measurements of SOC stocks under different types of land use change and land management are remarkable, we found that the impact is hardly quantified at the regional level using selected soil datasets or process models and may be due to insufficient data quality, representativeness and information availability, which are among the major challenges of upscaling from field measurements to estimating regional SOC stocks. Therefore, we proposed a comprehensive framework following the IPCC inventory approach to improve future studies, which underlines the needs of data collection from multiple sources, meta-analysis for calculating SOC stock change factors, and matching land and soil datasets.

Automated summary

Drylands are crucial in the terrestrial carbon cycle and climate change mitigation. Field measurements of soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks under land use change and management are significant, but quantifying their impact regionally remains a challenge due to insufficient data quality and information availability. A comprehensive framework following the IPCC inventory approach is proposed to improve future studies in this area.