Potential of sequestration carbon in soil and organic matter dynamics in degraded pastures in Brazil

Abstract

In Brazil, about 70% of the pasture areas show some stage of degradation, which is marked, in most cases, the abrupt reduction in stocks of soil organic matter. Despite being the world leader in beef production, Brazil has low productivity, 0.7 AU ha-1 approximately. The intensification of these areas may reflect in a case of double benefit, increasing the production of cattle in the area already converted and carbon stocks in the soil. With the development of this project, it aims to quantify the potential for carbon sequestration in degraded pasture of Brazil and elucidate the dynamics of soil organic matter recovery in these areas. For this, the project is divided into five main parts: 1 - Formation of database changes in stocks of soil carbon in pasture recovery; 2 - Modeling the data collected; 3 - Modeling the Brazilian potential for carbon sequestration in pasture; 4 - Predicting recovery scenarios pastures and calculating the error of the estimates; and 5 - Study the dynamics of soil organic matter in the priority areas. The parameters used to characterize these dynamics will be: stocks of carbon and nitrogen, natural abundance of 13C, physical fractionation of organic matter characterization of humic substances by fluorescence and optical emission spectroscopy with laser-induced plasma. Data analysis will consist of validation and calculation of uncertainty of modeled and simulated data. In characterizing of the change in carbon stocks in the soil will be used principal components analysis with the aid of the statistical package SAS. (AU)