Richard Scharf is a soil scientist with over 25 years of experience in a variety of soils-related projects. His expertise includes soil carbon accounting, soil mapping, soil and groundwater flow studies, agroforestry, wildlife management, plant habitat and wetland delineations. His project management experience includes both private and public-sector projects in South Carolina, North Carolina, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio and Connecticut as well as working around the world validating and verifying offset projects. He has been involved in validating several AFOLU GHG offset credit methodologies for Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) and contributed to the development of two Climate Action Reserve (CAR) protocols as a Workgroup Member. He was the lead verifier for the first Climate Action Reserve Soil Enrichment Protocol Project and verified the first ACR nitrogen reduction project and the first ACR rice project.

Mr. Scharf serves as a Senior Scientist for Aster Global and has been with the team for over thirteen years. His duties include managing and conducting soils work for carbon offset crediting projects, auditing carbon offset credit projects and soil mapping and site evaluations for a variety of land uses. Mr. Scharf is a Certified Professional Soil Scientist and a South Carolina Registered Soil Classifier.

Project Experience:

• Soil organic carbon baseline measurement
• Part of validation team for multiple VCS methodologies, including VM0021, VM0042 and VM0007 framework update
• On V/V team for several tropical peatland projects
• On V/V team for an ACR Pocosin project
• Consulted for several temperate peatland projects
• Consulting on development for new carbon registries
• Validated/Verified numerous CCBA projects
• High intensity soil mapping
• Soil investigations for municipal and onsite wastewater systems
• Groundwater monitoring
• Wetland delineation
• Scenic River suitability studies
• Research – contaminant transport through soils
• Research – split nitrogen application on corn