Reviews and syntheses: The promise of big diverse soil data, moving current practices towards future potential

Abstract

Abstract. In the age of big data, soil data are more available and richer than ever, but – outside of a few large soil survey resources – they remain largely unusable for informing soil management and understanding Earth system processes beyond the original study. Data science has promised a fully reusable research pipeline where data from past studies are used to contextualize new findings and reanalyzed for new insight. Yet synthesis projects encounter challenges at all steps of the data reuse pipeline, including unavailable data, labor-intensive transcription of datasets, incomplete metadata, and a lack of communication between collaborators. Here, using insights from a diversity of soil, data, and climate scientists, we summarize current practices in soil data synthesis across all stages of database creation: availability, input, harmonization, curation, and publication. We then suggest new soil-focused semantic tools to improve existing data pipelines, such as ontologies, vocabulary lists, and community practices. Our goal is to provide the soil data community with an overview of current practices in soil data and where we need to go to fully leverage big data to solve soil problems in the next century.

Remote Sensing Data to Support Integrated Decision Making in Cultural and Natural Heritage Management. Impasses and opportunities for collaboration in agricultural areas

“…While integrated sustainable land management is a stated aim of multiple Western governments and NGOs, enabling the sharing and reuse of data relevant to agricultural land management, coordinating its acquisition, and collaborating to improve its analysis and interpretation, all remain difficult in practice (Coble et al 2018;Araújo et al 2021;Birner et al 2021;Todd-Brown et al 2021;Ali and Dahlhaus 2022;Ingram et al 2022). The data produced through remote and nearsurface sensing technologies exemplify the challenges and value of tighter integration.…”

Forming regional soil carbon networks to support effective climate change solutions

“…Organizations like the International Soil Carbon Network enable data from multiple sources to be stored on the same website (Harden et al., 2018; Todd‐Brown et al., 2022), and as a result, some progress has been made in developing methods for consolidating existing data to provide information that better addresses the needs of researchers, managers and policy makers (Malhotra et al., 2019). Nevertheless, data may need to be retrieved from multiple sources that can often leave the end user with challenging compatibility issues that may require specialists in soil C measurement and analysis to resolve.…”

Global patterns and edaphic-climatic controls of soil carbon decomposition kinetics predicted from incubation experiments

“…In short, these incubation-based model-data integration studies show that k ref varies widely across soils and ecosystems even under the same laboratory conditions (e.g., temperature and moisture). However, far less attention has been paid to the synthesis and generalization of the abundant laboratory-derived first-order kinetics parameters for more accurate representation of heterogeneous SOM decomposition processes in ESMs 41 . It is yet unsure whether certain patterns hold across diverse soils at the global scale.…”