A high spatial resolution soil carbon and nitrogen dataset for the northern permafrost region

This spatial dataset is quantifying soil organic carbon (SOC) and total nitrogen (TN) storage with their carbon to nitrogen ratio (C/N) in soils of the northern circumpolar permafrost region (17.9 × 10⁶ km²) based on ESA’s Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Global Land Cover dataset at 300 m pixel resolution.

The dataset contains GIS grids of the northern circumpolar permafrost region for SOC, TN and C/N ratio for the following depth increments (0⁠ – ⁠30, 0⁠ – ⁠50, 0⁠ – ⁠100, 100⁠ – ⁠200, 200⁠ – ⁠300, 0⁠ – ⁠300 cm). These GIS grids are based on 651 soil pedons encompassing more than 6500 samples from 16 different study areas across the northern permafrost region.

Additional metadata with the actual pedon and profile data is available as a companion dataset.

Citation

Juri Palmtag, Jaroslav Obu, Peter Kuhry, Matthias Siewert, Niels Weiss, Gustaf Hugelius (2022) A high spatial resolution soil carbon and nitrogen dataset for the northern permafrost region. Dataset version 1. Bolin Centre Database. https://doi.org/10.17043/palmtag-2022-spatial-1

Data description

The dataset contains 18 GIS grids of the northern circumpolar permafrost region; one grid for each of the three variables SOC, TN and C/N ratio for each of the following six depth increments (0⁠ – ⁠30, 0⁠ – ⁠50, 0⁠ – ⁠100, 100⁠ – ⁠200, 200⁠ – ⁠300, 0⁠ – ⁠300 cm).

There GIS grids are provided as tif, tfw and xml files. Total uncompressed file size: 10 GB. A compressed (zip) file is available for download. Compressed file size: 141.5 MB.

Comments

The used permafrost region dataset stretches over 17.9 × 10⁶ km² of the Northern Hemisphere, and is based on equilibrium state model for the temperature at the top of the permafrost (TTOP) for the 2000⁠ – ⁠2016 period (Obu et al. 2019).

Detailed pedon data on soil carbon and nitrogen for the northern permafrost region, based on 6529 analyzed samples from 651 soil pedons in 16 different sampling locations, is available as a companion dataset.

The GIS dataset is based on the companion dataset and is part of a publication.

All profiles were assigned to land cover class based on field descriptions. The main aim of the field studies compiled in the companion dataset was to perform SOC/TN pool inventories of each study area considering different land cover types, geomorphological landforms and soil properties.

For the upscaling, we used the land cover map from the Global ESA Land cover Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project at 300 m spatial resolution, retrieved from the ESA Climate Change Initiative Land Cover visualization interface.

We thank the ESA CCI Land Cover project for providing their data, which was used for upscaling our product to circumpolar scale.