Sofia Biffi

❣️ PS. Plenty of excellent advice on how to take care of hedges from @favcolourgreen.bsky.social and hedgelink.org.uk 🤓🌳

Bonus picture of a spooky hedge sitting at the boundary of a field and a cemetery! Josiah Judson hard at work here 🔨

7/7 huge thank you to my co-authors Pippa Chapman, Rich Grayson, Joseph Holden, Jonathan Leake, Holly Armitage, Sarah Hunt, and Guy Ziv! and thanks to @FoodSecurityUK @BBSRC for the support

here is the link to the #openaccesspaper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ag...

6/7 Knowing the age of the hedges, we also looked at average annual soil organic carbon sequestration and net annual sequestration.

Sequestration substantially decreased over time. 📉 Planting new hedges is key to contribute to #netzero!

Read the paper to get all the numbers 🧮

5/7 🚨So a key message in this paper is: DO NOT remove hedgerows!

If you do, that additional soil carbon will very quickly disappear

Do not let them disappear! Fill in the gaps, make sure to rejuvenate them! 🌳👶

4/7 But why is the additional hedge carbon stock the same across different locations?

It comes down to how this soil organic carbon is stored, as we looked at its distribution across different pools. POM is the fraction that increases under hedges

3/7 We found that the amount of carbon stored in soil varied between locations, as expected

BUT the average additional stock beneath hedgerows is the same!

‼️Hedges in England store an additional 40 tC/ha compared to improved grassland, no matter where they are 🌱📍

2/7 This time we went to different areas of the country to capture the range in geology, soil and climate that are typical of England’s improved grasslands. We went to Yorkshire, Cumbria, and Sussex

1/7 Our 2022 paper on #soil carbon storage by hedgerows found an additional 41.5 tC/ha under hedges and showed a build-up of carbon stock over time 🌳⌛

But a big question remained: how variable is this additional stock in different regions of the country? 🔎

📢New paper on planting #hedgerows

How much additional soil carbon builds up after planting hedges on grassland?

We looked at hedge #soil carbon storage across regions with different geologies and climate in England

📜https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2025.109471

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