Ancient soil organic carbon quantification in worldwide soils

These are the files for the paper in press for Global Change Biology entitled " Soil carbon dynamics reshaped by ancient carbon quantification". The doi of this paper will be provided once the paper will be published. In this paper we applied a mixing linear equation to 313 soils worldwide from radiocarbon databases to estimate the ancient OC (radiocarbon-free) contained in these soils. Beyond the calculated contribution of this ancient OC to soil organic carbon (SOC) in top, sub and deepsoils, we revisited the mean 14C age of SOC and consequently the soil carbon dynamics. The “Copard et al-GCB-data.xls” file is split in two table. Table 1 is referred to the soil 14C ISRaD and LSCE database and additional variables we calculated in order to know the ancient organic carbon mass concentration in a considered soil profile and its contribution to the soil organic carbon for each soil layer. Some of these variables were either calculated by using the equations given in the associated article published in Global Change Biology (Copard et al) or derived from literature associated to the reference listed in the two databases (ISRaD and LSCE). Table 2 is identical to table 1 with additional variables devoted to loess formations, as the age of the loess deposit (BP), the organic carbon concentration from loess, and additional references with their doi where these specific variables were found. The Copard et al-GCB-readme.xls file consists in a summary file with your data explaining the variables used and entries in each row and column of the data file. This includes units of measurement, a description of each variable and explanation of how the files relate to each other.