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Dryad

Cropland management impacts on soil organic carbon stock changes in US croplands from 1990 to 2015

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Jul 25, 2023 version files 3.64 MB

Abstract

This geospatial dataset represents soil organic carbon stock changes estimated from a counterfactual analysis of climate-smart soil management practices that were adopted in U.S. croplands between 1990 and 2015. The counterfactual scenarios are relative to historical cropland management implemented in the U.S. for the temporal domain of this study. These data provide a large-scale overview of the carbon stock changes in US cropland agricultural soils associated with conservation tillage, manure amendments, cover crops terminated with cultivation, cover crop terminated with herbicide, hay and pasture in rotation with annual crops, set-aside/Conservation Reserve Program lands. Data were generated using the DayCent ecosystem model driven by cropping histories in the USDA National Resources Inventory (NRI) and associated agricultural management data. The average annual stock change was calculated for each management practice to determine the impact. Average rates of annual stock changes on a per-hectare basis (averaged from 1990 to 2015) are presented as a gridded dataset. Data are in a GeoTIFF format on a 5 km grid.