Chronological Changes of Soil Organic Carbon from 2003 to 2010 in Korea

Chronological changes of soil organic carbon (SOC) must be prepared by IPCC guidelines for national greenhouse gas inventories. IPCC suggested default reference SOC stocks for mineral soils and relative stock factors for different management activities where country own factors were not prepared. 3.4 million data were downloaded from agricultural soil information system and analyzed to get chronological changes of SOC for some counties and for land use in Korea. SOC content of orchard soil was higher than the other soils but chronological SOC changes of all land use had no tendency in differences with high standard deviation. SOC contents of counties depended on their own management activities and chronological SOC changes of districts also had no tendency in differences. Thus, Korea should survey the official records and relative stock factors on management activities such as land use, tillage and input of organic matter to calculate SOC stocks correctly. Otherwise, Korea should establish a model for predicting SOC by analyzing selected representative fields and by calculating SOC differences from comparing management activities of lands with those of representative fields.