Dr. Gary Lanigan:

Up to now, we have been doing quite a lot of research, but the research projects tend to last for two to three years. The difficulty with soil carbon sequestration is that it is a decadal process if one wants to measure it. I will use the example of a swimming pool. If I have a tap dripping into a swimming pool and I say the only way to measure how much water is going into the pool is to measure its height, one measures the height at time A and one might need to wait ten years for the height to change measurably to actually see a demonstrable difference. It is the same for soil carbon. There are very large background levels of carbon - typically, in the order of 150 tonnes to 500 tonnes of carbon per hectare - and there is an input that might be half a tonne to a tonne of carbon per hectare, so there is a very low level going into a very large background. That is why the other way we get at it is to measure directly the amounts of CO2 being sucked up by the grass and the amount that is being released. The flux towers we use measure CO2 flux, the amount coming in and leaving, ten times per second, every second of the day and every day of the year at a field scale. We are not measuring a small patch of land but entire fields. That is what NASCO is. We then get direct measurement annually on the amount of sequestration going on in our mineral soils and the amount of emissions coming out of the peat soils.