0 cmSurface
Zinder, Niger
Everything below this line is measured, not described.
286 plant records logged within about eight kilometres.
Zinder
Niger
Sahelian farmland where the trees came back — not by planting, but by farmers letting what was already in the ground grow.
The ground under
Zinder, Niger
13.8072, 8.9881 · keep going ↓
5 cmTopsoil
4.3g/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
22t/haLow
tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm
Typical of long-tilled arable land or disturbed ground, where organic matter has been oxidised away faster than plants could replace it.
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
Nobody has looked here
No fungal records within about eight kilometres. That is a statement about recording effort, not about the soil — fungi are under-recorded nearly everywhere on Earth.
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 conventional account of the Sahel in the 1970s and 1980s is drought and desertification. What happened in parts of Niger afterwards is less well known: tree cover increased substantially across millions of hectares of farmland.
It was not a planting programme. Farmers stopped clearing the shoots that regrew from surviving root systems in their fields and began protecting and pruning them instead. The practice is usually called farmer-managed natural regeneration, and it spread because it worked and cost nothing.
Trees in a field shade the soil, drop litter, and — in the case of the acacias common here — fix nitrogen. The soil under this kind of parkland is not the soil of bare cropland, and the difference was made by a change in what people did rather than by anything added.
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