Insights//Essays & field notes

Field notes and essays from the practice

Long-form writing on soil, carbon, and agroforestry science: what the field work teaches, what the literature actually says, and how to defend the numbers in between.

Data & Methods

The Detection Limits of Soil Carbon: What a Measurement Programme Can Actually See

A soil carbon stock is a product of four measurements, and every one carries error. Spatial heterogeneity usually dominates the budget, bulk density is where systematic bias hides, and coarse fragments quietly wreck the arithmetic. What that means in practice: why fixed-depth and equivalent soil mass can differ by more than a hundred percent, how long a real change takes to become visible, what handheld spectroscopy costs you in precision, and which choices actually move the floor. Two interactive tools.

Continue readingAUG 14 2026

Soil Carbon

Does Soil Carbon Saturate? What the Ceiling Is, Where It Sits, and What Happens If You Keep Adding

"Soils will saturate" is used to end arguments, and it carries four separate claims: that a field has stopped gaining, that it has reached equilibrium, that its mineral capacity is exhausted, or that further gain is uneconomic. Only one is saturation. A working guide to which fraction actually fills up, why the most famous plateau in soil science cannot test saturation at all, why published capacity equations disagree by close to a factor of two on the same soil, and where the carbon goes when you keep adding anyway. Four interactive tools.

Continue readingAUG 7 2026

Soil Carbon

How Much Soil Carbon Can a Hectare Gain Per Year? A Benchmark for Removal Rates

A rate on its own means nothing. Whether 0.2, 1, or 5 tonnes of CO₂ per hectare per year is high or low depends on the stock it sits in, the depth it was measured over, the control it was compared against, and how long the clock has been running. A calibrated benchmark of soil organic carbon accrual across cover crops, residues, rotations, reduced tillage, organic amendments, agroforestry, grazing and land-use change, with the four-per-mille rule of thumb, the saturation curve that makes early rates unrepeatable, and why two honest papers on the same practice can differ tenfold. Four interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 31 2026

Agroforestry

How Much Carbon Does a Tree Capture Per Year? A Cross-System Benchmark

There is no single per-year rate. A believable figure is a range set by system, stand age, and whether you mean one tree or a hectare, and it spans more than an order of magnitude. A calibrated cross-system benchmark of per-tree and per-hectare sequestration rates, from tropical forest and agroforestry to plantations, farms, cities, and restoration, with the drivers of the spread and sanity checks for any claimed rate. Three interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 24 2026

Climate & Ecosystems

After the Fire: How Burning Reshapes Soil, and What Comes Back

Fire is not one thing, and neither is its effect on soil. A first-year nutrient flush and a hidden water-repellent layer, erosion in the middle years, and a long-term ledger of lost organic matter against stubbornly stable pyrogenic carbon. What the data show across the short, medium, and long term, from Canadian boreal fires and African savannas to slash-and-burn clearings and cereal stubble, and what you can actually do to help soil recover. Three interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 17 2026

Data & Methods

Representative of What? When a New Sample Falls Outside Your Model’s Domain

“Take a representative sample” carries two jobs: whether a sample reflects the area you want to describe, and whether a new location sits inside the conditions a calibrated model has actually seen. The applicability domain, the check most monitoring programmes skip, with two interactive tools to test whether a new or resampled point is in-domain.

Continue readingJUL 10 2026

Climate & Ecosystems

Adapting Trees and Forests to a Changing Climate: What Is at Risk, and Where Resilience Can Be Designed

Climate change is already killing trees through hotter droughts, moving the climate that cocoa, coffee, and forests are suited to, and eroding the permanence of forest carbon. What adaptation looks like across four systems, with two interactive tools.

Continue readingJUL 3 2026

Climate & Ecosystems

France on the Edge of a Climate Precipice: Droughts, Heatwaves, and the Collapse Thresholds of Ecosystems

In June 2026, France is living through its most intense heatwave on record, on soils already in deficit. A faithful translation of our French research notes, tracing how the country's vegetation, forests, and farming systems approach their tipping points, and how far and for how long they can hold before collapse. Forty-five references, four interactive tools.

Continue readingJUN 26 2026

Soil Carbon

Adapting Soil Management to a Changing Climate: What Needs to Change, and Where

Soil management designed for yesterday's climate will underperform under tomorrow's. The adaptation response across four agricultural contexts, from tropical cocoa agroforestry to European arable systems, and why soil organic matter is both the most important lever and the hardest to maintain under warming.

Continue readingJUN 19 2026

Biochar

When Biochar Works: The Soil × Climate × Crop Map of Yield Response

Biochar's global yield average sits at ~10–13%, but the average hides the answer: large gains on acidic tropical soils, near zero on temperate silts, sometimes negative. A decision framework for matching feedstock and pyrolysis to the soil and crop in front of you.

Continue readingJUN 12 2026

Biochar

Biochar: Carbon Removal, Soil Response, and the Accounting Question

Biochar is one of the rare carbon removals with a clear definition and a tradable claim. What the H/Corg ratio tells you about permanence, and how the 2026 standards (Verra VM0044, EU CRCF, EBC, Puro) split the credit across biomass owner, pyrolysis operator, farmer, and buyer.

Continue readingJUN 5 2026

Soil Carbon

Signal versus Noise: When a Soil Carbon Change Is Real

Soil carbon change is a small signal, 0.1 to 0.5 Mg C/ha/yr, set against a wider noise floor. Two interactive diagrams to move the dials, and what the 2026 MRV regimes (Verra VM0042 v3.0, GHG Protocol LSR, EU 2024/3012) demand before a change can be called real.

Continue readingMAY 29 2026

Soil Carbon

Is Soil Inorganic Carbon Critical to Include in Your Soil Carbon Accounting?

From 2027, the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Standard folds inorganic carbon into the soil carbon pool. When SIC is material, how an unmeasured SIC trend can mask the SOC signal, and what the analytical workflow has to look like.

Continue readingMAY 22 2026

Agroforestry

A Few Trees Hold Most of the Carbon: Why Remnants and Giants Matter in Cocoa Agroforestry

On tropical farms, a small number of large and remnant trees can dominate carbon stocks. Ignoring them distorts science, farm design, and carbon accounting alike.

Continue readingMAY 15 2026

Data & Methods

How Large Should Your Soil Carbon Sampling Campaign Be?

Sample size is a consequence, not a starting point. Fix the scale of inference first, ground variance in published data, commit to 0–60 cm and ESM accounting, and design to the MRV standard your buyer will be audited against.

Continue readingMAY 8 2026

Agroforestry

How to Calculate the Amount of Carbon in a Tree? Methods, Uncertainty, and Accounting

The full accounting chain: from DBH and wood density to a defensible confidence interval. Allometric bias, the retired 0.47 carbon fraction, the Monte Carlo uncertainty budget, and what the 2026 LSR, CCP, and CRCF regimes now demand.

Continue readingMAY 1 2026

Data & Methods

How Do You Model Soil Carbon Change Over Time?

RothC, AMG, Century, DayCent: four models, four different questions they answer best. A decision framework for choosing the right soil carbon model for the claim you need to defend.

Continue readingAPR 24 2026

Beyond the essays

We also publish reference works

Decks, workbooks, and datasets for practitioners: source-traced, versioned, and revised as the literature grows. They live in the catalogue, alongside the rest of what we publish.

Browse the catalogue →

Ekodama // Field practiceRef 2026-09

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