Bio
Keith Paustian is Professor of Soil Ecology, Dept. of Soil and Crop Sciences and Senior Research Scientist, Natural Resources Ecology Laboratory (NREL), Colorado State University, Fort Collins. His main fields of interest include agroecosystem ecology, soil organic matter dynamics and global change and he has written more than 80 journal articles and book chapters on these topics. He is currently leading projects to elucidate the factors and processes controlling soil organic matter dynamics and to develop better methods to measure and predict changes in soil carbon as a function of management and environmental variables. Other work includes projects to assess soil carbon sequestration and greenhouse gas mitigation potential in several states, including Iowa, Indiana and Nebraska, and to develop national US inventories of C emissions and sequestration of C in soil. His research also involves development of ecosystem and economic assessments to advise policy makers on the climate change mitigation. He has served as co-chair of an InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) workgroup on developing methodologies for estimating CO2 emissions from soils as part of the IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories. He was a Lead Author on an IPCC special report evaluating carbon sinks as a mitigation option for greenhouse gas mitigation and a Lead Author on the IPCC Good Practice Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.. He was also a member of IPCC workgroup II on Agricultural Options for Mitigation of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and a member of the IGBP/GCTE Soil Organic Matter Scientific Steering Committee. He is currently co-chairing a CAST taskforce on “Agricultural Mitigation of Greenhouse Gases: Science and Policy Options”. He is an editor of a recent book entitled "Soil Organic Matter in Temperate Agroecosystems. Long-term Experiments in North America (CRC Press)" and of two special issues dealing with soil C sequestration in the journals ‘Soil Tillage Research’ and ‘Climatic Change’.
