Map of soil organic carbon loss of mineral soils in Estonia

The internal EJP SOIL project SERENA contributed to the evaluation of soil multifunctionality aiming at providing assessment tools for land planning and soil policies at different scales. By co-working with relevant stakeholders, the project provided co-developed indicators and associated cookbooks to assess and map them, to report both on soil degradation, soil-based ecosystem services and their bundles, under actual conditions and for climate and land-use changes, at the regional, national, and European scales.

The map was generated to evaluate soil organic carbon (SOC) loss in Estonian agricultural soils. It is directly related to SERENA project WP3, T3.2, D3.3 with the aim of applying cookbooks to assess soil threats or ecosystem services. This map is the outcome of applying a cookbook developed by ISRIC (Genova, G., Poggio, L., Kempen, B., & Colman, B. DSM Workflow Seedling. ISRIC - World Soil Information. https://doi.org/10.17027/ISRIC-FSX2-2691).

The generated map of SOC loss expressed as absolute sequestration rate (t C ha-1 a-1) between 2015 and 2021 is in GEOTIFF format at the resolution of 100m. The input data for the cookbook was from the PANDA database, which contains regular soil monitoring and voluntary soil sampling data by farmers in Estonia. To achieve the aim for accounting SOC loss in agricultural soils temporal pairs were selected resulting in 1037 paired points where the interval between second sampling was more than 5 years. SOC stocks were calculated for the depth of 20 cm using the equation by Adams (1973) to calculate soil bulk density. The calculated SOC stock for time0 and time2 (> 5 years resampled locations) were used as input points for digital soil mapping, that is the ISRIC cookbook.