Devin’s Geospatial Map

The Issue

Our predictions about climate change and how it is going to occur into the future are very uncertain. This is largely due to the fact that we don’t know how carbon storage on land is going to change, and so we don’t know how much carbon is going to be emitted into the atmosphere from the soil. One of the major drivers of change in soil carbon storage is nutrient enrichment, and as humans produce fertilisers and change the nutrient concentrations of the soils around the world, it is changing the ability of the soil to store carbon. But we don’t know the magnitude of this effect so we cannot predict how nutrient enrichment is going to change.

Data scientist Devin Routh and Prof. Thomas Crowther 

What the Crowther Lab are going to do?

We are doing a global study using the NUT NET data set. We are exploring how nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium are changing the amount of carbon stored in the soil all around the world. Devin is working to generate a global map of this effect so we can say where nutrient enrichment is increasing and decreasing carbon stocks. Once we have done that we will be able to add up all of the values from around the world to get a global understanding that can help us to understand how carbon stocks are going to change over the rest of the century. This will tell us a little bit more about how the climate is going to vary over the rest of this time.