MELICERTES

One of the key goals of agroecology and agroforestry is to promote carbon storage in soils and develop practices that enable it. The MELICERTES project focuses on modeling, assessing, and developing approaches to quantify and monitor organic carbon stocks in ecosystems and cultivated soils, particularly through remote and proximal sensing. The project proposes a new method to analyze carbon fluxes using these data, as well as their large-scale dynamics. The main factors characterizing these fluxes, including organic carbon content, will be identified, and their spatial distribution will be analyzed and predicted.

Specifically, MELICERTES aims to estimate spatial distributions of organic carbon in soils and associated uncertainty. To achieve this, the following research program will be applied:

• Integrate data from multiple and heterogeneous sources to develop spectral and spatial models of soil organic carbon content, driven by satellite and ground-based measurements ;
• Develop satellite diagnostics of agricultural practices that maximize soil carbon storage (carbon-storing practices) and leverage satellite, spectral, and spatial results to build and adapt models of organic carbon content and stocks in the soil ;
• Develop a new class of data-driven models to infer ecosystem dynamics ;
• Combine soil organic carbon models with global systemic models to provide a new diagnosis of carbon-storing agricultural practices.

The innovative aspect of this project is the development of methods and tools to establish predictions of ecosystems directly on a large scale based on measured data. These models, breaking away from existing machine learning approaches, aim to characterize spatial and temporal dynamics related to the productivity, health, and resilience of agro-ecosystems.