Soil organic carbon enhancement in diverse temperate riparian buffer systems in comparison with adjacent agricultural soils

Agroforestry for sustainable production and resilient landscapes

“…The abundance of SOC was higher in subsoil and suggested better SOC stability and potential advantage of C sequestration in the Prairie. Ofosu et al (2021) explored the soil-organic carbon (SOC) sequestration with different riparian systems in southern Ontario, Canada. This study investigated SOC sequestration potential in the upper 0-60 cm soil layer in Riparian Buffer System (RBS).…”

Diverse temperate riparian buffer types promote system-level carbon sequestration in southern Ontario, Canada

“…Washington Creek is located in the Grand River Watershed (GRW) in Oxford County. It is a nine-kilometer first order stream that drains 1739 ha of the Gray Brown Luvisolic soils (Mozuriaitis and Hagarty 1996) of the agriculturally dominated landscape of the GRW (Oelbermann and Gordon 2000;Ofosu et al 2022).…”

“…In this study therefore, a deciduous site consisted of 70% or more deciduous trees and the remaining trees would have been coniferous and vice versa. It was assumed that, aside from the natural forest buffer sites, all RBSs were established on previous agricultural lands by allocating a portion to establish trees or grass to prevent soil erosion and to reduce non-point source pollutants from entering the water source (Oelbermann and Gordon 2000; Oelbermann and Raimbault 2015; Ofosu et al 2022). Therefore, the AAg fields were considered as the control plots (no perennials) and this allowed us to estimate the changes in C pools resulting from the conversion of agricultural lands to RBSs.…”

“…Total soil mass per hectare (Mg ha -1 ) to a 60-cm depth in AAg fields was calculated from the volume of soil to 60-cm depth for a hectare multiplied by its corresponding bulk density. SOC stock on an equivalent soil mass basis (ESMB, Mg C ha -1 ) was then calculated as the product of the total soil mass per hectare, derived for the AAg field soil, and the C concentration (%) obtained for the AAg field and RBSs soils for the 0-60 cm soil layer as described by Barcena et al 2014;Georgiadis et al 2017 andOfosu et al 2022. This approach was taken so as to use the AAg field SOC as the reference SOC level, based on the assumption that this portion of the AAg field was similar to that in the RBSs before they were established.…”

“…Agroforestry, the growing of trees and/or other perennial plants together with annual crops and/or animals on the same piece of land for ecological and/or economic returns through positive interactions between the individual components (Gordon 2008), is one of many human interventions that seek to reduce the sources of GHG emissions or enhance their sinks (IPCC 2018). Riparian buffer systems (RBSs) are a type of agroforestry system where strips of perennial vegetation, including grasses, shrubs, and/or trees are established between agricultural fields and adjacent aquatic ecosystems (Udawatta and Jose 2011;Vijaykumar et al 2020;Ofosu et al 2022). RBSs provide multifunctional services including reduction of soil erosion and stabilization of stream banks due to their extensive root network that capture surface runoff and hold soil particles together, water quality enhancement by filtering pollutants from non-point sources and maintaining biodiversity by providing wildlife habitat (Thevathasan and Gordon 2004;Fortier et al 2010).…”