Agricultural Soil Inventory (BZE-LW)

Since the beginning of 2023, sites of the German Agricultural Soil Inventory (BZE-LW) have been resampled to analyse changes in key soil properties. Field work in several federal states, including Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Hesse, is nearly complete. Sampling in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia and Saxony-Anhalt is currently underway. The 1000th point will be revisited in spring 2025 and a preliminary report will follow later in that year. The entire second nationwide sampling campaign of the BZE-LW is scheduled for completion by the end of 2029.

Christopher Poeplau, Roland Prietz, Axel Don: Plot-scale variability of organic carbon in temperate agricultural soils - Implications for soil monitoring

In a pre-study for the second BZE-LW, the small-scale variability of carbon stocks in arable and grassland soils was investigated. The central question was whether a minimal offset of the initial profile pit would result in negligible random sampling errors. This was not the case, as even a distance of 40 cm resulted in a mean random error of about 8%. However, increasing the sample size to three profiles reduced the error by half. In the future, the BZE-LW will work with four small profile pits.

https://doi.org/10.1002/jpln.202100393

On December 5th 2018, the final report of the BZE-LW was handed over to Minister Klöckner in Berlin. The 318-page report can be downloaded here as Thünen report #64. In this report are all evaluation results with status of the analyses from May 2018.

An illustrated summary of the final report of the German Agricultural Soil Inventory was published by the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and is available here. Selected results are summarized in 48 pages in an easily understandable way (only in German).

The results of the BZE-LW will continue to be published in international journals (see Results and Publications).