Electron Accepting Capacities of a wide variety of peat materials from around the Globe similarly explain CO2 and CH4 production

In peat soils the availability of terminal electron acceptors (TEAs), both inorganic and organic, largely determines the ratio of carbon dioxide to methane formation under waterlogged, anoxic conditions. The redox properties of peat organic matter and their relationship with anoxic carbon mineralization are yet only investigated for a limited amount of peat and reference materials, although electron accepting capacities of organic matter (EACOM) largely predominate over canonical inorganic TEAs in peatlands. To address this knowledge gap, we incubated 60 peat samples from four different depths of 15 sites located in five major peatland regions (including Germany, Sweden, Russia, France and Chile) distributed around the globe covering a variety of both bog and fen type samples and characterized their capacities to serve as electron acceptors for anaerobic carbon dioxide production.
The dataset consists of a wide variety of recorded and calculated variables for a 56-day incubation of those samples. These variables include the formation and rates of methane, carbon dioxide, electron acceptor capacities and electron donator capacities at two different times, data on stable isotopes in delta notation (such as nitrogen, carbon and sulfur), molar element ratios for carbon/nitrogen, carbon/sulfur and nitrogen/phosphorus and elemental contents like silicon, phosphorus, sulfur, calcium and iron as well as specific fourier transformed infrared spectroscopy ratios regarding the ratios of polysaccharides and aromatic structures. The dataset was created mostly in 2019, with some additional measurements carried out in 2020 and 2021.