Much has been written about the use of vegetation as a means of removing Carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in plant tissue. Most of the concentration of this work has been on the use of trees as carbon sinks as it has been very easy to calculate the amount of carbon stored inside a tree’s shoots, stems and leaves. Sadly, relatively little has been written about the use of grasses as carbon storage sinks. What has been written suggests that the grasses are even more effective at storing carbon than are trees. There are several reasons for this:

• Grasses are very effective at shifting carbon into the soil. Grasses for the most part have an annual root system with most of the smaller roots dying off each year and a new set of roots becoming established from the base of the plant. Thus each year many grasses will shed almost their entire root system into the soil which deposits large amounts of fibre (mostly carbon) into the soil and then the plants go about consuming more carbon as they build a replacement root system.
• Many native grasses form phytoliths (plant stones) that are solid aggregates of carbon within the leaves. These are not just ordinary bundles of carbon but are highly durable globules of bound carbon that are not able to break down for some thousands of years after production. While individually they are quite small, there are many produced and they can tie up large amounts of carbon for very long periods. What is interesting here is the work by scientists at Southern Cross University, NSW has shown that not all species produce phytoliths, but that the natives seem particularly adept and that trees are very poor at doing it.
• When trees break down, either rapidly in a fire or slowly through death and decay, the carbon that was in their foliage is returned to the atmosphere. Thus tree carbon is only a relatively temporary solution to  carbon sequestration.
• When grasses die, the leaves decompose and release carbon back to the atmosphere. So the selection of long-lived grasses is important if your aim is to provide a long-term carbon sink. Clearly native grasses are highly persistent in their natural environment and are a natural choice for this purpose.
• When monitoring equipment is finally able to reliably and cheaply evaluate soil carbon levels it is likely to show that soil carbon under a well maintained native grass stand will be much higher than those under forests, that the levels continue to accumulate if grazing is managed well and that it is mostly held as long-term storage. All of which are likely to show that native grass pastures are an efficient and clever means of storing carbon.