Carbon (C) storage in forest ecosystems involves numerous components including biomass C and soil C (Fig. 1). The total ecosystem C stock is large and in dynamic equilibrium with its environment. Because of the large areas involved at regional/global scale, forest soils play an important role in the global C cycle Land use change causes perturbation of the ecosystem and can influence the C stocks and fluxes. In particular, conversion of forest to agricul- tural ecosystems affects several soil properties but especially soil organic carbon (SOC) concentration and stock. The conversion to an agricultural land use invariably results in the depletion of SOC stock by 20–50%