SOC indicator of land-degradation: responses of continuous and non-standard discrete RothC models to environmental changes

The effects of environmental change on ecosystem dynamics is nowadays a major research question. Soil organic carbon (SOC) models are integrated into many ecosystem models for projecting the effects of these changes in the achievement of land degradation neutrality. The Rothamsted Carbon (RothC) model, initially developed to simulate the effects of different practices for long-term agricultural experimental sites, can be successfully used to monitor and project the SOC indicator of land degradation. Here, continuous and discrete versions of the RothC model are firstly compared on classical long-term experiments carried out at the Rothamsted Experimental Station; then a non-standard monthly time stepping procedure is used to evaluate the response of the model to changes of temperature, Net Primary Production (NPP), and land use soil class (forest, grassland, arable) in the protected areas of Alta Murgia National Park in the Italian Apulia region and Magura National Park in Polish Subcarpathian Voivodeship.