EcoSphere

Ground built by grass

Poltava

Ukraine

The chernozem belt — black earth up to a metre deep, made by steppe grass over thousands of years.

The ground under

Poltava, Ukraine

49.5883, 34.5514 · keep going ↓

5 cmTopsoil

83.2g/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

56t/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

737 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 built by grass

Deep-rooted grassland puts carbon down rather than up. The richest agricultural soils on Earth were made this way, over thousands of years, and can be spent in a century.

Chernozem, literally black earth, is the soil that grassland makes when the climate gives it long cold winters and enough summer rain. Decomposition is slow, roots are deep, and organic matter accumulates until the topsoil is dark all the way down.

It is the most fertile soil type on Earth by most measures, and Ukraine holds a large share of the world's total. That fertility is why the region has been agriculturally significant for as long as records exist.

The comparison worth making is Konza. Two grassland soils built by the same mechanism on two continents — one still under grass, one under some of the most intensive arable farming anywhere.

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