Soil Carbon Sequestration using Lawn Ground Covers

Baker, Derek

Student Work

Soil Carbon Sequestration using Lawn Ground Covers

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Climate change is a global threat to life on Earth, and as such, action must be taken to prevent the increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. In the process of reaching net- zero and net-negative emissions, carbon sequestration will play a pivotal role in offsetting emissions by transferring carbon from the atmosphere to the terrestrial biosphere. Within the field of carbon sequestration, storing carbon in soil via land management practices is a promising endeavor. Further, lawn use practices in developed areas pose a potential way to increase carbon storage in soil. The goal of this experiment was to investigate ground-covers commonly used in lawns to determine their abilities to stabilize carbon in soil as a step towards evaluating the feasibility of storing carbon in lawn soil. An experiment was designed to grow Kentucky bluegrass and white clover in relatively controlled conditions and to measure the change in soil organic carbon (SOC) over time for each plant. SOC was measured using a destructive loss-on-ignition (LOI) method which involved weighing samples before and after being ignited in a furnace. The experiment was found to have numerous significant sources of error due to complexities that were not accounted for in the design and from fundamental limitations that arose due to the short time scale and lack of resources available to run the experiment. As a result, the experiment could not conclude whether one of the plants was more effective for stabilizing carbon than the other. There were some trends that suggested that SOC decreased in the soil over time, which may have been a result of some of the possible mechanisms of carbon stabilization such as leaching, erosion, or microbial respiration, though there is a significant likelihood that the trends were due to confounding or random error.

This report represents the work of one or more WPI undergraduate students submitted to the faculty as evidence of completion of a degree requirement. WPI routinely publishes these reports on its website without editorial or peer review.

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