Carbon sequestration below Miscanthus

What is it about?

Over the lifetime of a bioenergy plantation it must be i) commercially viable, ii) environmentally beneficial, and iii) carbon neutral or better. The general consensus with Miscanthus is that harvesting the plant aboveground every year is ok because the dead parts of the plant remain in the soil and increase the quantity of carbon in the soil. Our study shows that even when soil carbon stocks do not increase, Miscanthus is still carbon neutral.

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Why is it important?

Few studies create a full life-cycle analysis of greenhouse gas stocks at a single site. Even fewer do so for 7 full years, below bioenergy crops. This study is one of the first of it's kind to include in-situ measurements of CO2, CH4, N2O, soil carbon and plant biomass from a long-term experiment. Furthermore, soil surface chamber greenhouse gas measurements are complimented by eddy covariance tower measurements increasing the confidence in our site-scale conclusions.