Climate change mitigation potential of widespread cover crop adoption in U.S.

This geospatial dataset represents climate change mitigation benefits from widespread cover crop adoption on U.S. cropland. We simulated changes in soil organic carbon stocks and nitrous oxide fluxes over a 20-year period for baseline cover crop adoption rates (derived from historical adoption rates) and a high cover crop adoption (80%) scenario in the continental U.S. Data were generated using the DayCent ecosystem model driven by cropping histories in the USDA National Resources Inventory (NRI) and associated agricultural management data. Here we present the mean and standard deviation of annual soil organic carbon stock changes and nitrous oxide fluxes for both baseline and high cover crop adoption scenarios on a county level., We compared a high (80%) cover crop (CC) adoption scenario with the most current CC adoption rates in each region (NASS, 2017) and projected the 20-year soil organic carbon (SOC) stock change and N2O flux for each scenario. The DayCent biogeochemical model was used to simulate the effect of CC on 132,319 survey locations included in the National Resources Inventory (NRI), a program that monitors land use in the United States and cumulatively represent 94.1 Mha of cropland in the country. Either crimson clover (Trifolium incarnatum L.), cereal rye (Secale cereale L.), or radish (Raphanus sativus) CC were simulated depending on regional CC species preferences and compatibility with the crop rotation and management specific to each NRI location. A Monte Carlo approach adapted from Ogle et al. (2010, 2023) was used to quantify uncertainty associated with management input data and error in model parameters.
We aggregated average annual SOC stock change and N2O flux for the baseline and high ..., , # Climate change mitigation potential of widespread cover crop adoption in U.S.

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fbg79cp3v](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.fbg79cp3v)

This geospatial dataset represents climate change mitigation benefits from widespread cover crop adoption on U.S. cropland. We simulated changes in soil organic carbon stocks and nitrous oxide fluxes over a 20-year period for baseline cover crop adoption rates (derived from historical adoption rates) and a high cover crop adoption (80%) scenario in the continental U.S. Data were generated using the DayCent ecosystem model driven by cropping histories in the USDA National Resources Inventory (NRI) and associated agricultural management data. Here we present the mean and standard deviation of annual soil organic carbon stock changes and nitrous oxide fluxes for both baseline and high cover crop adoption scenarios on a county level.

## Description of the data and file structure

We compared a high (80%) cover crop (CC) adoptio...