§6711 Carbon cycle research

Summary

If money is provided, the Secretary must give a grant to the Consortium for Agricultural Soils Mitigation, run through Kansas State University, to lead carbon-cycle research at national, regional, and local levels using nine land‑grant universities: Colorado State, Iowa State, Kansas State, Michigan State, Montana State, Purdue, Ohio State, Texas A&M, and the University of Nebraska. Those universities must use the funds to study ways to store more carbon in soils and plants (including trees), test new tools like biotechnology and nanotechnology, work with federal, state, and private partners to find best farming practices, build computer models, measure carbon from conservation programs, forests, and other lands, run outreach with Extension Services for farmers, and work with the Great Plains Regional Earth Science Application Center to create space‑based remote sensing that gives near‑continuous vegetation monitoring, models carbon sequestration, and helps make commercial products. The Secretary, with agencies in the U.S. Global Change Research Program, may also fund competitive grants to colleges and universities to learn about carbon flows in soils and plants and the flow of other greenhouse gases from agriculture. That research must bring together soil scientists, agronomists, economists, foresters, and others to collect data on carbon gains and losses, study how farming and forestry practices (and new technologies) affect greenhouse gases, improve cost‑effective ways to measure and model carbon changes, evaluate links to federal conservation programs, use remote sensing to check leakage and permanence, and test how results could be used for accounting. The law allows whatever funds are needed for these activities for fiscal years 2002 through 2007, limits administrative costs to no more than 3% of the funds, and authorizes $15,000,000 for each of fiscal years 2007 through 2012.