MELICERTES

Promote carbon storage in soils and develop practices for improving it are one of the key objectives of agroecology and agroforestry. The MELICERTES project will model, assess and develop approaches for quantifying and monitoring organic carbon levels and stocks in ecosystems and cultivated soils, in particular using remote sensing and proxi-detection. Using these data, the project will propose a new method for analysing carbon flows and their dynamics on a large scale. The main factors characterising these flows, and in particular the organic carbon content, will be identified and their spatial distribution analysed and predicted.

In particular, MELICERTES aims to estimate spatial distributions of organic carbon in soils and the associated uncertainty. To achieve this, the following research programme will focus on:
- Integrating data from multiple and heterogeneous sources to develop spectral and spatial models of soil organic carbon content, driven by satellite and ground-based data;
- developing satellite diagnostics of agricultural practices that maximise soil carbon storage (stocking practices) and build and adapt soil organic carbon content and stock models using the satellite, spectral and spatial results;
- developing a new class of data-based models to infer ecosystem dynamics;
- combining soil organic carbon models and global system models to provide a new diagnosis of agricultural practices that store carbon.

The development of methods and tools for establishing ecosystem predictions directly on a large scale, based on measured data forms the innovative aspect of this project. The aim of these models is to characterise the spatial and temporal dynamics associated with the productivity, health and resilience of agroecosystems, using different methods that the existing machine learning ones.

Financing: French National Research Agency (ANR), France 2030 programme, PEPR Agroecology and Digital Technologies

Beginning: 2022
Duration: 5 years (2022-2027)

Web site: https://www.pepr-agroeconum.fr/les-projets-finances/traitement-de-donnees-et-modelisation/projets-cibles/melicertes