Interactive effects of landscape position and soil diversity drive the spatial variability of soil organic carbon concentration in subalpine soils of Switzerland

Data for: “Interactive effects of landscape position and soil diversity drive the spatial variability of soil organic carbon concentration in subalpine soils of Switzerland”.

Preprint available on EarthArXiv: https://doi.org/10.31223/X52171

The interactive effects of topography, soil type, soil texture and moisture on soil organic carbon (SOC) concentration in subalpine environments remain largely unexplored. In particular, the extent to which soil type shapes landscape-scale SOC patterns remains unclear.

In this study, we assessed SOC concentration, soil type, soil moisture conditions and texture, elemental composition across 100 plots in two subalpine catchments in the Swiss Alps. We investigated the joint influence of these predictors on SOC variability at the landscape scale in a linear mixed-effect model.

This dataset includes:

Soil data

Average temperature and moisture

Combined temperature and moisture data

Localities table of temperature and moisture sensors

Link to R scripts used for analysis and figure productions

The soil data were used in a factor analysis to produce 3 factors, subsequently used in a linear mixed-effect model to identify key drivers of SOC concentration. Users can reuse the data and provided scripts to reproduce the statistical analysis, factor analysis and linear mixed-effect model reported in the manuscript.