ABSTRACT
Soil carbon is not randomly distributed across landscapes, being affected by the factors which affect pedogenesis generally (Birkeland, 1984) as well as by soil management practices and erosion (Lai et al., 1998). An understanding of the influence of these factors on soil carbon contents is essential as it will form the basis for scaling up point observations of carbon contents and fluxes to project, regional and national scales and allow the development of efficient sampling schemes. This is a key issue both for developing reliable national estimates of carbon inventories as part of the Kyoto Protocol (United Nations, 1997) and also as a means of devising efficient monitoring protocols for carbon emissions trading.
