Soil Carbon Sequestration and Ecosystem Services.

Quality of most agricultural soils, depleted of their soil organic carbon (SOC) pool because of historic land use and management, is degraded and characterized by poor soil structure, unfavorable porosity and pore size distribution, water and nutrient/elemental imbalance, and low activity and species diversity of soil fauna and flora.  Decline in soil quality, exacerbated by a severe reduction in SOC pool to below the critical/threshold level, jeopardizes numerous ecosystem services.  Thus, re carbonization of soils of the agro ecosystems can enhance ecosystem services.  Important among these are increase in the net primary productivity (NPP) and advancing food security, improvement in quality and quantity of renewable water resources, increase in biodiversity, and adaption and mitigation of climate changes.  Thus, incentivization of land managers by payments for ecosystem services is essential to the re carbonization of agricultural soils through adoption of those land use and soil management practices which create a positive C budget.