Data to assess spatially and species-explicit plant-based soil carbon sequestration on global marginal land

The curated data serves to quantify the biophysical potentials of specific plant-species (here referred to as biopumps) to enhance soil organic carbon sequestration on global marginal land, limited to low soil organic carbon stocks (≤50 t SOC ha-1) in bare and sparsely vegetated (15%) land covers, as well as abandoned agricultural land (over the period 2010-2018). The boundary delimitation of marginal land is an aggregation of specific target areas based on the world regions and the FAO’s global ecological zones, as a single-band raster dataset (see file “TA.tif”), applicable at regional and global scopes. The SOC modelling is based on yield and allometric relations to partition the carbon among the different plant fractions to determine the carbon inputs to the soil computed per biopump (see file “BiopumpData.xls”). The dataset contains two main data files with a double purpose to i) propose a mapping of global marginal land by means of combined and intersected georeferenced products (see file “targetarea.csv”), and identify suitable plant species (see file “biopump.csv”) on the target areas, both determined by geographic- and environmental (i.e. climatic and edaphic) constraints, and ii) at the same time to inform SOC models (here RothC v26.3 model) and other well-established models (e.g. RUSLE2015 on soil erosion) on the required model input data (e.g. monthly climate data and actual evapotranspiration, soil texture, plant-based C-inputs, soil cover, etc.). The matching and SOC modelling, including soil C erosion, are automatized with R script by loading the two .csv files (see file “R script”).