CSIRO - Advancing Farm Productivity, Program of Research, Seminar Series

Seminar One: Soil Organic Carbon: Composition, Drivers, and Pathways to Resilient Production Systems

Presenter: Dr. Senani Karunaratne, Team Leader, Agriculture and Food, CSIRO

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• Free

Dates and Times

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Helen Hicks

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About the Series:

Hosted by the Advanced Farm Productivity Program of Research within CSIRO's Agriculture and Food Research Unit, this series explores how research and innovation can support the long-term productivity and profitability of Australian agriculture.

Presentation Abstract:

Soil organic carbon (SOC) sits at the heart of agricultural sustainability, underpinning nutrient cycling while offering a valuable pathway for climate mitigation through carbon storage. However, realising this potential depends on understanding not just how much carbon soils hold, but what form it takes, as different forms of carbon have different residence times and different soil functions. This talk moves beyond total carbon measurement to examine the datasets and analytical methods used to characterise SOC's various measurable fractions, asking what these compositional insights reveal about SOC's role in soil function and in building farmscape resilience to environmental stressors. This raises a central question: what is the attainable, stable form of soil carbon, and what does it mean for how we manage soils over the long term? From this conceptual grounding, the talk turns to the practical evidence base, drawing on a recently completed national-scale effort under the Soil Organic Carbon Monitoring project. Key findings on the drivers of SOC stock change over decadal timeframes show how land management, carbon inputs, soil properties, and climate interact to shape outcomes across diverse landscapes. The talk closes by drawing these threads together to consider the practical challenge of building and maintaining soil carbon in production systems.

About the presenter:

Senani Karunaratne is a principal research scientist with CSIRO Agriculture and Food. His work focuses on understanding how land management and environmental drivers affect soil organic carbon, with an emphasis on characterising functionally distinct carbon fractions, integrating these into process-based models, and developing data-driven surrogate models for space-time upscaling using freely available datasets, including Earth observation data. Senani and his team lead the first national-scale monitoring network dedicated to soil carbon, established through the recently completed SOC-M project (2021-2026). Their modelling work is incorporated into Australia's National Inventory, the official account for land sector reporting under Australia's obligations to the UNFCCC and was part of the co-design of the soil carbon farming methodology developed by the Australian Government. Senani is also currently serving as an IPCC lead author, a technical advisor for the Australian Government National Inventory within the Department of Climate Change, Energy and the Environment and Clean Energy Regulator.

This webinar series is moderated by Ben Trevaskis, Research Program Director and/or Rick Llewellyn, Senior Principal Research Scientist, A&F, CSIRO.

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