Soil organic carbon is not just for soil scientists measurement recommendations for diverse practitioners

• Published in: Ecological applications Vol. 31; no. 3; pp. 1 - 19
• Main Authors: Billings, S. A., Lajtha, K., Malhotra, A., Berhe, A. A., deGraaff, M.-A., Earl, S., Fraterrigo, J., Georgiou, K., Grandy, S., Hobbie, S. E., Moore, J. A. M., Nadelhoffer, K., Pierson, D., Rasmussen, C., Silver, W. L., Sulman, B. N., Weintraub, S., Wieder, W.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States John Wiley and Sons, Inc 01-04-2021; Ecological Society of America
• Subjects: Carbon; Carbon Sequestration; Datasets; Ecosystem; ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; global C cycle; Microorganisms; New technology; Nutrient availability; Nutrients; Organic carbon; Organic soils; Scientists; Soil; soil climate feedbacks; Soil investigations; Soil microorganisms; Soil sciences; Soil structure; standardized soil methods; Terrestrial environments; soil-climate feedbacks; standardized soil methods; global C cycle
• ISSN: 1051-0761; 1939-5582
• DOI: 10.1002/eap.2290

Soil organic carbon (SOC) regulates terrestrial ecosystem functioning, provides diverse energy sources for soil microorganisms, governs soil structure, and regulates the availability of organically bound nutrients. Investigators in increasingly diverse disciplines recognize how quantifying SOC attributes can provide insight about ecological states and processes. Today, multiple research networks collect and provide SOC data, and robust, new technologies are available for managing, sharing, and analyzing large data sets. We advocate that the scientific community capitalize on these developments to augment SOC data sets via standardized protocols. We describe why such efforts are important and the breadth of disciplines for which it will be helpful, and outline a tiered approach for standardized sampling of SOC and ancillary variables that ranges from simple to more complex. We target scientists ranging from those with little to no background in soil science to those with more soil-related expertise, and offer examples of the ways in which the resulting data can be organized, shared, and discoverable.