EDI Staging Environment
This data package contain four soil organic carbon (SOC) maps resulted from the best data-model agreement of the analysis carried out in the frame of the Ph.D. Thesis ‘MODELING ORGANIC CARBON FOR QUANTIFICATION OF RESERVOIRS IN TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS AT THE NATIONAL LEVEL’ (Pilar Durante). Theses maps correspond to the estimates of SOC concentration (SOCc, g/kg) and SOC stocks (SOCs, tC/ha), and their associated spatially explicit uncertainties maps, for the Region of Murcia at 0-30 cm and 100 m spatial resolution.
To achieve this, we evaluated four different digital soil mapping (DSM) approaches to estimate SOCc and SOCs for the Region of Murcia (11,313 km2), a topographic and climatic complex area in southern Iberian Peninsula, at three spatial resolutions (100m, 250m, 1000m). Using a local SOC database (255 soil profiles), we founded that a Quantile Regression Forest (QRF) approach had the best data-model agreement at 100 m spatial resolution, with the best balance of accuracy, external validation, and interpretability. The QRF model showed a mean SOCc of 12.18 g/kg with an overall uncertainty of 10.54 g/kg and an accuracy percentage of 79%; meanwhile the mean SOCs was 27,572 GgC with an uncertainty of 0.016 GgC. The analysis showed that using local environmental covariates and local soil information to predict SOC within this region resulted in a relative improvement between ~40% (for SOCc) and ~65% (for SOCs) when compared with SOC products derived from national and global databases. Our results provided evidence that large discrepancy exists between national and global estimates for reporting SOC at a local scale. Consequently, local-to-regional efforts are needed to better describe SOC spatial variability to reduce uncertainty and improve the assessment of soil resources.
EDI is a collaboration between the University of New Mexico and the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Center for Limnology:
