A mobile platform will track carbon as it moves through UK farms—from plant photosynthesis to soil storage and back into the air as respiration—using automated chambers and real-time isotope analysers. Current methods for measuring carbon fluxes work well in controlled settings but fail across the UK’s patchwork of climates, soils, and farming systems. Existing equipment is often too bulky, power-hungry, or limited to short-term studies. This platform solves those problems: it runs on a low-energy power supply, deploys across crops, grasslands, and agroforestry, and uses carbon-13 as a tracer to reveal exactly how and when carbon moves from plants into soils. If successful, the platform will give farmers and policymakers hard data on which management practices—from low-intensity grazing to high-input systems—actually lock carbon into soil rather than releasing it. That could reshape agricultural subsidies, inform net-zero strategies, and improve soil health monitoring across the UK. The team will first test the system on long-term grassland under different grazing and fertiliser regimes, comparing carbon fluxes across management intensities. The platform also links to existing BBSRC, NERC, and Wolfson-funded projects, ensuring broad scientific use beyond this initial trial.
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A critical component of sustainable agriculture is the need to maintain productivity while maximising other critical ecosystem services, notably carbon capture and storage. Quantifying the major pathways of carbon through agri-ecosystems requires data on ecosystem respiration, and gross and net primary production, which are core inputs and outputs of carbon in ecosystems. To gain much needed mechanistic insight into processes underpinning these fluxes, stable isotopes of carbon (13C) can be used as a tracer, mainly for short-term intensive measurements. While the technologies for measuring these fluxes are established, they remain challenging to measure on-farm because the UK agricultural landscape is hugely variable: the UK has large climatic gradients, complex geology and soils and highly variable farming systems. Added to this, measurements in the ‘real-world’ require technologies that have an autonomous power supply for most locations. A final challenge concerns the need for CO2 flux chambers to be deployable across a range of vegetation types and ages, from small stature plants early in the growing season to mature tall cereal crops or grasslands at peak growth. To address these challenges, we will create a platform that integrates a network of the latest large-volume automated CO2 flux chambers with real-time 13CO2 isotopic gas analysers to create a system for quantifying major fluxes of carbon, and labelling plants with 13CO2 and measuring subsequent fluxes from soils and plants. The platform will provide critical data for evaluation of processes contributing to soil health, carbon storage and function in agri-ecosystems. The mobility and use of the latest chamber technologies permits application to a range of agricultural systems including key arable and horticultural crops, grazed grasslands and agroforestry systems, across the UK. Our initial project will test how different long-term grassland management regimes (from extensive low input systems to intensive systems with high density grazing and fertiliser inputs) influence carbon fluxes, and the seasonal fluxes of recent plant photosynthate from plants to soils. The platform will comprise real-time isotopic analysers (x2), automated chambers (x32), a free-standing low-energy power supply, and environmental sensors all provided by a single supplier. The platform aligns to a range of existing projects and equipment in related areas funded by BBSRC, NERC and Wolfson by our Co-Leads, to ensure access by a broad community of scientists, excellent added-value and the ability to tackle a wider range of challenges than otherwise possible. Moreover, the proposal benefits from £100k cash contribution by Lancaster University and use of Lancaster’s Hazelrigg Environmental Research facility.
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