Quick Carbon

Quick Carbon is a research initiative led by the Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative at Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Quick Carbon’s mission is to create an accessible measurement system that empowers individuals to generate reliable soil carbon data for ecological understanding, decision making, and markets. We believe that the central challenge of measuring soil carbon, and its response to management, is the lack of rapid assessment tools and informed sampling frameworks. The Quick Carbon team has developed a low-cost method for rapidly measuring soil carbon across large landscapes at fine spatial resolutions using field spectrometers. These affordable, pocket-sized devices estimate soil carbon using the reflectance of soils in the visible and infrared spectra. The inexpensive nature of this methodology lends land managers the ability to look at impacts of management decisions on below-ground carbon at broad extents and frequent time intervals. For these reasons we believe that Quick Carbon has the ability to change the way we understand and manage for carbon in rangeland systems.