EcoSphere

Ground that is worked

Flevoland

Lelystad, the Netherlands

Some of the youngest agricultural soil on Earth: seabed until the middle of the twentieth century, farmland since.

The ground under

Flevoland, Lelystad

52.5185, 5.4714 · keep going ↓

5 cmTopsoil

64.8g/kg

grams of organic carbon per kilogram of soil

The living layer: dead leaves, roots, bacteria, and the fungal threads that bind them into crumbs. Almost everything that happens to soil carbon happens here first.

30 cmThe stock

60t/haModerate

tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm

The ordinary range for productive farmland and managed gardens in temperate Europe.

The exact spot you searched for is sealed — built over, paved or water — so there is no soil there to model. This reading is from open ground about 4 km away.

ISRIC — World Soil Information

Modelled at 250-metre resolution from global soil surveys, and read from SoilGrids on 2026-09-01. SoilGrids publishes in versioned releases rather than continuously, so this figure is the current one until they publish again.

deeperThe network

10,025 fungal records near here

Each one is a specimen somebody found and wrote down. The species below are only the ones that fruit visibly; the threads that do the work almost never appear above ground at all.

GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility

Each name links to the original record, with its collector, date and dataset.

Why this ground

Ground that is worked

Every farmed soil is a running experiment in how fast carbon can be lost or put back. Some of these places have been measuring the answer for over a century.

Flevoland was under the Zuiderzee. It was enclosed, pumped dry, and the polders fell dry between the 1940s and the 1960s — which means the soil profile here has existed for a human lifetime rather than for millennia.

That makes it a rare thing: a soil whose entire history is documented. Everything in it has been added since the water left, by reeds sown from the air to dry the ground out, then by crops, then by decades of management.

Read it against Poltava. One soil is a few decades old and one is several thousand years old, both are farmed intensively, and the numbers will not be close. Time is the ingredient that cannot be substituted.

Read this against

Or measure somewhere else