EcoSphere

Ground that is worked

Rothamsted

Harpenden, Hertfordshire, England

The longest-running agricultural experiment in the world, on plots that have been treated the same way since 1843.

The ground under

Rothamsted, Harpenden

51.8092, -0.3746 · keep going ↓

5 cmTopsoil

94.9g/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

64t/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

5,612 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.

In 1843 John Bennet Lawes and Joseph Henry Gilbert began field experiments comparing manure, mineral fertiliser and nothing at all. Some of those plots have received the same treatment every year since, which makes them the longest continuous agricultural experiment anywhere.

Soil samples have been archived throughout, so it is possible to measure things nobody knew to look for at the time. The archive has been used for questions its creators could not have imagined, from radioactive fallout to atmospheric nitrogen deposition.

The result that matters for this site is simple and took a century and a half to establish: plots given organic matter every year hold visibly more carbon than plots given mineral fertiliser alone, and both differ from plots given nothing. Soil carbon responds to management, slowly, and the response persists.

Read this against

Or measure somewhere else