The importance of accounting method and sampling depth to estimate changes in soil carbon stocks

Background
As interest in the voluntary soil carbon market surges, carbon registries have been developing new soil carbon measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) protocols. These protocols are inconsistent in their approaches to measuring soil organic carbon (SOC). Two areas of concern include the type of SOC stock accounting method (fixed-depth (FD) vs. equivalent soil mass (ESM)) and sampling depth requirement. Despite evidence that fixed-depth measurements can result in error because of changes in soil bulk density and that sampling to 30 cm neglects a significant portion of the soil profile’s SOC stock, most MRV protocols do not specify which sampling method to use and only require sampling to 30 cm. Using data from UC Davis’s Century Experiment (“Century”) and UW Madison’s Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial (WICST), we quantify differences in SOC stock changes estimated by FD and ESM over 20 years, investigate how sampling at-depth (> 30 cm) affects SOC stock cha..., This data is comprised of two different datasets. The first dataset comes from University of California, Davis’ Century Experiment at the Russel Ranch Sustainable Agriculture Facility (38°32′24″N, 121°52′12″W). The second dataset comes from UW Madison’s Wisconsin Integrated Cropping Systems Trial (WICST) at the UW Madison Agricultural Research Station in Arlington, WI (43°18″N, 89°20″W). Data were previously published in Sanford et al. (2012) (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2012.08.011) and Tautges et al. (2019) (https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.14762). To explore management impacts on soil carbon accrual over time. See these publications for details on data collection.
All datasets were cleaned to remove any missing values and organized for input into the SimpleESM R function (https://github.com/fabienferchaud/SimpleESM). SimpleESM requires an excel input document with bulk density (g cm-3) and carbon concentration (g kg-1) data. Bulk density (\"BD\")and carbon concentration (\"Concentrations\"..., , # Data from: The importance of accounting method and sampling depth to estimate changes in soil carbon stocks

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p2ngf1w06](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.p2ngf1w06)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset contains 3 different excel files: WICST data, UC Davis Century Maize treatments, and UC Davis Century Wheat treatments. Each file contains the following sheets:

* Readme: contains a summary of the content, a description of all column names, and a table that matches the original treatment name (used in the excel document) to the corresponding treatment name used in Raffeld et al. (2024)
* Original_data: Original, unedited data from WICST and UC Davis Century experiment, used in Sanford et al. (2012) and Tautges et al. (2019), respectively.
* BD: Contains bulk density measurements by treatment, plot, point, depth, and year.
* Concentrations: Contains carbon concentration measurements by treatment, plot, point, depth, and year.
* Any \"NA\"...