Suraj Melkani

student

graduate assistant, Department of Soil, Water, and Ecosystem Sciences, UF/IFAS Everglades Research and Education Center

Publications

Four Conservation Agricultural Practices to Manage Organic Soil Loss

Noel Manirakiza, Suraj Melkani, Xue Bai, Yang Lin, and Jehangir H. Bhadha

This factsheet highlights four common conservation agricultural practices that can be implemented to limit organic soil loss. Organic soils (Histosol) are the most important soils that play a crucial role in mitigating global warming by acting as a repository for terrestrial carbon. Within south Florida, nearly 450,000 acres of Histosols are at risk from soil loss via oxidation, and growers would like to know the best ways to manage their soils to limit soil loss. Using the USDA-NRCS framework, we have identified four conservation practices—cover cropping, crop rotation, organic amendments, and conservation tillage—that can be implemented to address organic matter loss within the region.

Current and Emerging Protocols for Carbon Measurement in Agricultural Soils

Suraj Melkani, Noel Manirakiza, Shirley M. Baker, and Jehangir H. Bhadha

Soils have the capacity to function as a sink of atmospheric carbon dioxide and are crucial for climate regulation. Soil have the potential to store around 1.5 to 2.4 trillion metric tons of C in the soil globally. They contain large C pools that can store three times more C than the atmosphere and four times more than plants. These massive C sinks have the potential to reverse soil degradation, mitigate climate change, and enhance food security. It is therefore essential to monitor the C cycle by accurately measuring the amount of soil C in agricultural fields. This can help in developing sustainable management practices that can minimize C emissions and sequester C into the soil from the atmosphere. This publication describes the various current and emerging protocols that can be used to measure soil C.