University of Maryland Geographical Sciences researcher and NASA Harvest Hub member, Dr. Ritvik Sahajpal has been invited to act as a guest editor for a special issue on Cropland Carbon in the journal Land. The issue focuses on the potential of regenerative agriculture techniques to mitigate Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and how to best implement, monitor, verify and report them. The call for papers is available through the MDPI Cropland Carbon Special Issue webpage.

The special issue information is as follows:

Ensuring global food security relies partly on increasing the intensity and acreage devoted to agricultural production. While agricultural lands have potentially large CO2 offset capacities, agricultural activities, including farm-related land clearing and deforestation contribute to climate change through GHG emissions. Regenerative agriculture (RA) techniques promise to address this dilemma by working to enhance soil and environmental health while maintaining or building on the yield gains in traditional intensive agriculture. This Special Issue will collect the latest research that can improve our understanding of the impact of RA techniques on food production and environment at a variety of scales, characterize cropland carbon cycling, and use modeled and satellite-based Earth Observation (EO) data to effectively monitor crop productivity and C fluxes.

In this Special Issue, we invite papers focusing on, but not limited to, the following topics:

1. Modeling/mapping of C fluxes in RA ecosystems
2. Evaluating the use of EO data to monitor crop productivity as impacted by management techniques used in RA ecosystems
3. Understanding the linkages between food security, climate change and soil degradation in traditional agriculture and RA ecosystems
4. Establishing baseline spatio-temporal datasets on RA management practices such as no-till, biochar, etc.

Due date: August 31st 2020

This article was adapted from its original posting by the UMD Department of Geographical Sciences.