The DOI matches its Crossref record; 140 of the 140 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Biochar in agriculture – A systematic review of 26 global meta‐analyses
Open accessAbstract
Biochar is obtained by pyrolyzing biomass and is, by definition, applied in a way that avoids its rapid oxidation to CO 2. Its use in agriculture includes animal feeding, manure treatment (e.g. as additive for bedding, composting, storage or anaerobic digestion), fertilizer component or direct soil application. Because the feedstock carbon is photosynthetically fixed CO 2 from the atmosphere, producing and applying biochar is essentially a carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology, which has a high‐technology readiness level. However, for swift implementation of pyrogenic carbon capture and storage (PyCCS), biochar use in agriculture needs to deliver co‐benefits, for example, by improving crop yields and ecosystem services and/or by improving climate change resilience by ameliorating key soil properties. Agronomic biochar research is a rapidly evolving field of research moving from less than 100 publications in 2010 to more than 15,000 by the end of 2020. Here, we summarize 26 rigorously selected meta‐analyses published since 2016 that investigated a multitude of soil properties and agronomic performance parameters impacted by biochar application, for example, effects on yield, root biomass, water use efficiency, microbial activity, soil organic carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. All 26 meta‐analyses show compelling evidence of the overall beneficial effect of biochar for all investigated agronomic parameters. One of the remaining challenges is the standardization of basic biochar analysis, still lacking in many studies. Incomplete biochar characterization increases uncertainty because adverse effects of individual studies included in the meta‐analyses might be related to low‐quality biochars, which would not qualify for certification and subsequent use (e.g. high content of contaminants, high salinity, incomplete pyrolysis, etc.). In summary, our systematic review suggests that biochar use in agriculture has the potential to combine CDR with significant agronomic and/or environmental co‐benefits.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Bio-char Sequestration in Terrestrial Ecosystems – A Review
Lehmann, J., Gaunt, J., & Rondon, M. (2006) · Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change · doi:10.1007/s11027-005-9006-5 · Cited by 3,053
Review of mechanisms and quantification of priming effects
Kuzyakov, Y., Friedel, J. K., & Stahr, K. (2000) · Soil Biology and Biochemistry · doi:10.1016/s0038-0717(00)00084-5 · Cited by 3,040
Biochar for environmental management: science and technology
(2009) · Choice Reviews Online · doi:10.5860/choice.47-0296 · Cited by 2,949
Sustainable biochar to mitigate global climate change
Woolf, D., Amonette, J. E., Street-Perrott, F. A., Lehmann, J., & Joseph, S. (2010) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/ncomms1053 · Cited by 2,680
Jeffery, S., Verheijen, F. G. A., van der Velde, M., & Bastos, A. C. (2011) · Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment · doi:10.1016/j.agee.2011.08.015 · Cited by 2,422 · cited 1×
“These were often >10 tons per hectare up to 100 tons (Biederman & Harpole, 2013; Jeffery et al., 2011, 2014; Kammann et al., 2012).”
BackgroundBiochar for Environmental Management: Science, Technology and Implementation
(2015) · doi:10.4324/9780203762264 · Cited by 2,280
Is soil carbon mostly root carbon? Mechanisms for a specific stabilisation
Rasse, D. P., Rumpel, C., & Dignac, M.-F. (2005) · Plant and Soil · doi:10.1007/s11104-004-0907-y · Cited by 1,861
Biochar and its effects on plant productivity and nutrient cycling: A meta-analysis
Biederman, L. A., & Harpole, W. S. (2013) · GCB Bioenergy · doi:10.1111/gcbb.12037 · Cited by 1,737
Meta-analysis and the science of research synthesis
Gurevitch, J., Koricheva, J., Nakagawa, S., & Stewart, G. (2018) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature25753 · Cited by 1,709 · cited 2×
“From those, we excluded 10 studies that did not use proper meta- analytical tools (Gurevitch et al., 2018) but carried out other statistical methods instead (e.g. paired t- tests, analysis of co- variance).”
MethodQuantifying publication bias in meta-analysis
Lin, L., & Chu, H. (2018) · Biometrics · doi:10.1111/biom.12817 · Cited by 1,674
Cited by
Rizwan, M., Murtaza, G., Zulfiqar, F., Moosa, A., Iqbal, R., Ahmed, Z., Irshad, S., Khan, I., Li, T., Chen, J., et al. (2023) · Frontiers in Environmental Science · doi:10.3389/fenvs.2023.1277240 · Cited by 60
Wijitkosum, S. (2023) · Journal of Human, Earth, and Future · doi:10.28991/hef-2023-04-04-07 · Cited by 43
Zhang, X., Zhang, J., Song, M., Dong, Y., & Xiong, Z. (2022) · Environmental Pollution · doi:10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119491 · Cited by 33
Williams, J. M., & Thomas, S. C. (2023) · Restoration Ecology · doi:10.1111/rec.13861 · Cited by 15
Romero, C. M., Redman, A.-A. P. H., Owens, J., Terry, S. A., Ribeiro, G. O., Gorzelak, M. A., Oldenburg, T. B. P., Hazendonk, P., Larney, F. J., Hao, X., et al. (2022) · Science of The Total Environment · doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.152267 · Cited by 17
Metadata
- Authors
- Schmidt, H., Kammann, C., Hagemann, N., Leifeld, J., Bucheli, T. D., Sánchez Monedero, M. A., & Cayuela, M. L.
- Venue
- GCB Bioenergy
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2021-09
- Volume
- 13
- Issue
- 11
- Pages
- 1708-1730
- ISSN
- 1757-1693 (ISSN-L)
- 1757-1707
- OpenAlex
- W3198220514
- Cited by
- 490
- References
- 140
- FWCI
- 7.23
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Biochar in agriculture – A systematic review of 26 global meta‐analyses. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1111/gcbb.12889
- The paper
- Schmidt, H., Kammann, C., Hagemann, N., Leifeld, J., Bucheli, T. D., Sánchez Monedero, M. A., & Cayuela, M. L. (2021). Biochar in agriculture – A systematic review of 26 global meta‐analyses. GCB Bioenergy. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcbb.12889
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
