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

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 ..., Six grids, one for each counterfactual scenario, are provided as GeoTIFF raster data files. Each GeoTIFF file has 627 rows x 967 columns with a 5 km resolution. Each grid cell value represents the change in soil carbon due to the management practice and is in units of metric tons of carbon per hectare per year. The values are averages from 1990 to 2015, and a positive value represents an increase in soil C given the management practice.
Point-level scenario stock differences are interpolated to a gridded map product. They were created using an interpolation process with an inverse distance weighting spatial method that determines each grid cell value using a linear-weighted combination of sample points within a threshold distance of 20 km. NRI survey locations closer to the cell centroid are given more weight in calculating the SOC stock change than points further from the centroid. We required a minimum of 5 NRI survey locations within the 20 km threshold to calculate a grid cell value..., Any program or image processing software that is compatible with GeoTIFF formats (e.g., ArcGIS).