Letter of the editor
This issue of Soil Horizons showcases upgrades to S-map, and recent research on soil carbon benchmarking, carbon sequestration, and nutrient losses under variable-rate irrigation.
We give an overview of recent results from New Zealand’s national soil carbon monitoring programme, in which 504 sites were established to determine a robust baseline of soil organic carbon stocks for agricultural land. These results provide spatially representative data to feed into national soil carbon inventory reporting.
We provide stories on enhancing S-map (New Zealand’s digital soil map), which now covers 11 million hectares. The S-map team has recently completed an extra half a million hectares of new soil mapping across some of our best food-producing land. New Zealand is internationally recognised as having a high diversity of soil types – find out how many have been mapped so far.
We report on modelling upgrades to soil profile-available water, which is used by many stakeholders via tools such as OverseerFM. Significant efforts have been made to improve the modelling of soil water storage for Pumice, Granular and Allophanic soils, which in turn supports better decision-making on the farm.
We also report on the first assessment in New Zealand of the practical applicability of enhanced rock weathering as a potential mitigation to help reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and on a study of leaching losses under two contrasting soils for a mixed cropping system.
John Drewry
Editor
Senior Researcher - Soil Physics
