About

Different landscape mosaics contribute an as yet poorly quantified contribution to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and carbon sequestration, as well as having an uncertain direct warming effect through variations in their surface properties thereby limiting our ability to implement mitigation measures at the farm scale.

GHG-Manage aims to assess the GHG characteristics and surface-related warming effects of the most relevant European landscape types and to examine the optimum configuration of different land uses and management interventions, including afforestation-related GHG offsetting, to minimise or reduce GHG emissions. It will provide information that can be utilised for on-farm reporting tools, including an economic tool and the Cool Farm Tool (CFT), whilst also using this information to both refine and increase the utility of these approaches, particularly in relation to CH₄ and N₂O exchange and for organic soils.

Important compensation mechanisms will be quantified and their impact on regional to national scale GHG emissions and soil carbon stocks assessed. Finally, appropriate methodologies to report and verify the effects of landscape scale GHG emission compensation mechanisms, both top-down and bottom-up, will be developed and assessed.

Results

Some of the major results so far include:

• Identification of an appropriate whole farm model to estimate potential land use offsetting approaches.
• Development of approaches to measure GHG fluxes over small fields for accounting purposes.
• Assessment of the methane uptake ability of different forest systems.
• Two workshops on land use mosaics and GHG emissions.
• Contributions to EGU and ISCRAES meetings on GHG emissions from agro-ecosystems and sustainable crop production.