A meta-analysis of carbon storage in Indian soils under changing
land-use systems for managing soil health and ensuring food security
Abstract
Several studies on carbon status have considered current land management
practices and land use systems. There however is a need for
meta-analysis study to understand the status of carbon over long periods
and ways to boost its storage in soils the current scenario to ensure
sustainability for securing food by improving soil health. In this
context over 1786 pairs dataset from several studies were generated
during period 1990-2019 had been collected from Indian experiments. The
review shows that carbon status has negative effect on land uses (barren
land, cultivated land, grassland, horticultural land and plantation
land) over the forest land. The other land uses can be carbon equivalent
to forest land by regaining the carbon stocks by 34, 41, 2, 34 and 48%,
respectively. If this can become possible through management practices,
a large amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide can be restored in the soil
and problems of climate change can be mitigated. Also, this paper is
synthesized to characterize the human interventions for their effects to
sequester carbon in cultivated soils. Integration of organics with
chemical fertilizer in cultivated soil can be one of the better land use
management strategies for restoring carbon in the soil. The effect of
carbon and yield was significantly increased in integrated nutrient
management by 23.2% and 1.2% (in rice) and 16.2% and 4.5% (in
wheat), respectively in comparison to inorganic alone. Therefore,
meta-analysis of these data sets provides information that may help the
scientific community to strategically guide and plan future development
initiatives.