Abstract. A critical aspect of predicting soil organic carbon (SOC) concentrations is
the lack of available soil information; where information on soil
characteristics is available, it is usually focused on regions of high
agricultural interest. To date, in Chile, a large proportion of the SOC
data have been collected in areas of intensive agricultural or forestry use;
however, vast areas beyond these forms of land use have few or no soil data
available. Here we present a new SOC database for the country, which is the result of
an unprecedented national effort under the framework of the Global Soil
Partnership. This partnership has helped build the largest database of SOC
to date in Chile, named the Chilean Soil Organic Carbon database (CHLSOC),
comprising 13 612 data points compiled from numerous sources, including
unpublished and difficult-to-access data. The database will allow users to
fill spatial gaps where no SOC estimates were publicly available previously.
Presented values of SOC range from 6×10-5 % to 83.3 %,
reflecting the variety of ecosystems that exist in Chile. The database has the potential to inform and test current models that predict
SOC stocks and dynamics at larger spatial scales, thus enabling benefits
from the richness of geochemical, topographic and climatic variability in
Chile. The database is freely available to registered users at
https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/NMYS3 (Pfeiffer et al., 2019b) under the
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License.
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