African Darks Earths: Climate Mitigation and Sustainable Agriculture

Soil organic carbon is a critical contributor to soil health and sustainable agriculture for global food production, and an important sink of atmospheric C for climate change mitigation. Localized African Dark Earth soils found in Ghana have been created through long-term intentional human inputs of organic materials, including char, and show greater fertility than surrounding unmanaged soils. African Dark Earths thus represent not only a scientific curiosity but a potential solution to widespread limitations to sustainable agricultural food production and climate mitigation in this part of the world. Plante will establish a reciprocal intellectual exchange of PIs and graduate-level students between Penn, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research-Soil Research Institute based in Kumasi, Ghana, and the University of Ghana, Legon to study the biological, chemical, and physical soil properties and processes that lead to Dark Earth formation.