0 cmSurface
The Loess Plateau, Yan'an
Everything below this line is measured, not described.
363 plant records logged within about eight kilometres.
The Loess Plateau
Yan'an, Shaanxi, China
Wind-blown silt hundreds of metres deep, farmed for millennia, eroded catastrophically, and then partly restored.
The ground under
The Loess Plateau, Yan'an
36.5853, 109.4897 · keep going ↓
5 cmTopsoil
29.3g/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
42t/haModerate
tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm
The ordinary range for productive farmland and managed gardens in temperate Europe.
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
34 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.
- Schizophyllum commune Fr.2025
- Erysiphe R.Hedw. ex DC., 18052018
- Cortinariaceae2014
- Sebacinaceae2014
- Rhizopogonaceae2014
- Suillaceae2014
- Tricholomataceae2014
- Thelephoraceae2014
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.
The Loess Plateau is made of dust. Silt blown from the interior of Asia over hundreds of thousands of years accumulated to depths measured in hundreds of metres — soft, fertile, and almost defenceless against water once vegetation is removed.
Millennia of cultivation and grazing stripped that cover, and the plateau became the single largest source of sediment to any river on Earth; the Yellow River is named for what it carries. Erosion of this kind removes not just carbon but the ground itself.
Beginning in the late 1990s a very large restoration programme terraced slopes, banned grazing on the steepest land, and replanted vegetation across the region. It is one of the few landscape-scale reversals anywhere, and it is still argued over — what was gained in soil retention, what was paid in water yield downstream.
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