Impact of tropical land-use change on soil organic carbon stocks - a meta-analysis

Land-use changes are the second largest source of human-induced greenhouse gas emission, mainly due to deforestation in the tropics and subtropics. CO2 emissions result from biomass and soil organic carbon (SOC) losses and may be offset with afforestation programs. However, the effect of land-use changes on SOC is poorly quantified due to insufficient data quality (only SOC concentrations and no SOC stocks, shallow sampling depth) and representativeness. In a global meta-analysis, 385 studies on land-use change in the tropics were explored to estimate the SOC stock changes for all major land-use change types. The highest SOC losses were caused by conversion of primary forest into cropland (−25%) and perennial…