Soil & Peat

A short report assessing the opportunities and limitations of soil and peatland to sequester carbon with land use or management change.

The Brief: Establish intervention logic for Soil Nutrient Management (SNM) plans across all improved agricultural land. Establish the environmental benefits including GHG emissions reduction, biodiversity, water quality and air quality which will be secured through the universal uptake of SNM plans. Identify the contribution that better SNM will make to the economic resilience and sustainability of Welsh agriculture.

The Brief: Establish the intervention logic for supporting the diversification of swards in improved grassland. Establish the Greenhouse Gas (GHG), water quality, air quality and economic benefits. Establish the environmental outcomes including GHG emissions reduction, biodiversity, water quality and air quality, which will be secured through diversification of sward management. Identify the contribution that sward diversification will make to the economic resilience and sustainability of Welsh agriculture.

The Brief: Improving Soil Carbon Management (SCM) is vital for a resilient future of agriculture in Wales. This report is in two parts, Improved Soils and Upland Soils, as the type and impact of management interventions may differ markedly due to fundamental differences in structure, organic matter and nutrient content.

The Welsh Government commissioned a series of evidence reviews to support the development of proposals for future agricultural schemes. The reviews explored the evidence for interventions around a number of key areas, and their causal links to environmental, economic and social outcomes.

The second part of the review task provided an opportunity for the evidence review team to offer some suggestions as to the concept, design, operation and evaluation of the new scheme.

This report reviews the technologies to capture evidence of soil erosion, with a special focus on the possible opportunity photo or satellite imagery surveys provide for identifying where erosion is occurring and then it can be linked to landscape and land-use factors, providing a means of identifying causes and producing mitigation strategies.

New analysis was carried out to explore the reported loss of topsoil-C between 2007 and 2016 in the ‘Habitat’ category in the final GMEP report. This ‘Habitat’ category is defined as all habitats except woodlands, arable and improved grassland

To facilitate use of GMEP data in SoNaRR, we present new analyses of national monitoring data which has been co-developed with SoNaRR technical leads at Natural Resources Wales (NRW).

The technical annex for Report 30 GMEP re-analysis for SoNaRR.

This report forms a brief summary after Phase-1 of the Soil Degradation, Erosion & Compaction project within ERAMMP. It outlines what has been done and what will be required for Phase-2.

The field survey handbook for soil assessment.

Earth Observation (EO) offers an important monitoring platform for detecting soil erosion and damage (SED). In this report two case studies are presented. The first compares imagery of different resolutions and its ability to detect SED features. While the second, compares time-lapse images for assessing changes in a landslide. A final section describes some of the challenges and opportunities for using EO to detect soil characteristics and their change.

Would the expansion of cultivated crops on Welsh farms be an effective mechanism for improving the resilience of farm businesses and for reducing Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions? This report reviews greenhouse gas emissions from arable crops, and then examines the specific issue of the impacts of soya bean meal imports on animal nutrition, and what the alternatives are. Soya bean meal has become an essential component of feed for high yielding dairy cattle, pigs and poultry due to the types of proteins and amino acids it contains. The possibility of growing these alternatives in Wales is discussed, assessing greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts