Seminar One: Soil Organic Carbon: Composition, Drivers, and Pathways to Resilient Production Systems

Hosted by the Advanced Farm Productivity Program of Research within CSIRO’s Agriculture and Food Research Unit, this series explores how research and innovation can support the long-term productivity and profitability of Australian agriculture.

About the presenter

Senani Karunaratne is a principal research scientist with CSIRO Agriculture and Food. His work focuses on understanding how land management and environmental drivers affect soil organic carbon, with an emphasis on characterising functionally distinct carbon fractions, integrating these into process-based models, and developing data-driven surrogate models for space-time upscaling using freely available datasets, including Earth observation data. Senani and his team lead the first national-scale monitoring network dedicated to soil carbon, established through the recently completed SOC-M project (2021-2026). Their modelling work is incorporated into Australia’s National Inventory, the official account for land sector reporting under Australia’s obligations to the UNFCCC and was part of the co-design of the soil carbon farming methodology developed by the Australian Government. Senani is also currently serving as an IPCC lead author, a technical advisor for the Australian Government National Inventory within the Department of Climate Change, Energy and the Environment and Clean Energy Regulator.