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.