AgStack launches a global scientific collaboration on a digital open-source field-carbon-model for in-field carbon accounting in agriculture

As part of its mission to increase the efficiency of innovation in food and agriculture through scalable, reusable open-source digital infrastructure, the AgStack Foundation, a project of the Linux Foundation, announced the launch of a sub-project for developing a global-scale, open-source digital/remote sensing model for FIELD-LEVEL CARBON MONITORING for agriculture and forestry applications.

Global climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing our world today. As we continue to see the effects of global warming, it has become increasingly important to take action to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. One strategy that has gained momentum is using agriculture and forestry land for carbon sequestration – the process of capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in ground reservoirs. While public-private stakeholders have been developing incentive structures to encourage participation through carbon credit markets, the current measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) process is manual, expensive and becomes economical only for large growers and projects. Making a sustainable global impact requires an MRV process that can provide transparency and can scale efficiently to enable participation from stakeholders of all sizes economically viable.

AgStack’s subproject will leverage the power of existing digital infrastructure such as the geo-id, asset registry and the open-source community to develop models that enable existing carbon sequestration models such as the NASA SMAP to be scaled down so they can be used at an individual field level. Participants will be able to use the open-source models and compute parameters such as carbon flux through public or private data sources on their own servers and report back using the geo-id digital infrastructure maintained by AgStack.

In conclusion, climate change is a global challenge that requires urgent action. Carbon sequestration is a promising strategy to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate the impact of climate change. However, the expense of the MRV process is a challenge that AgStack is actively trying to solve through open-source.

Contact
Sumer Johal
AgStack Project
sjohal@linuxfoundation.org