EES Seminar: Global soil carbon potential – What if everyone is right and where do we go from here?

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Abstract
There has been an explosion of interest in soil carbon sequestration as a natural carbon reduction strategy. Soil carbon stocks are an appealing reservoir for sequestering anthropogenic carbon dioxide due to their relatively low risk, low technological barrier, and potential for long residence time. But how much carbon sequestration potential is there globally? Where are the places soils are currently accumulating anthropogenic carbon dioxide and would these locations lend themselves to more active management interventions? Two very contrasting approaches are being taken in soil science: digital soil mapping approaches rooted in soil carbon stock surveys and machine learning, as well as process models rooted in soil carbon flux studies and differential equations. In this talk we’ll explore where these representations deviate, how they could be reconciled, and how we can use modeling as a tool to expand our understanding of soil carbon potential for carbon dioxide draw down in the future.

Bio
Dr. Todd-Brown is a computational biogeochemist who uses simulates to study how soils breath and links up data to support those simulations. She has been an Assistant Professor at the University of Florida in the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences since 2019. Before coming to UF she was a Postdoctoral Fellow (2019) at Wilfred Laurier University, a Distinguished Linus Pauling Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Lab (2015-2018), and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oklahoma (2014). She received her PhD (2013) from the University of California, Irvine from the Earth System Science Department, holds a Mathematics Bachelors of Science degree (2004) from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California in Mathematics, and worked as a software developer for bioinformatics tools at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.