Journal Article
Earth System Science Data, vol. 13, iss. 2, pp. 255-267, 2021
Authors
Jinshi Jian, Rodrigo Vargas, Kristina Anderson-Teixeira, Emma Stell, Valentine Herrmann, Mercedes Horn, Nazar Kholod, Jason Manzon, Rebecca Marchesi, Darlin Paredes, Ben Bond-Lamberty
Abstract
Abstract. Field-measured soil respiration (RS, the soil-to-atmosphere CO2 flux) observations were compiled into a global soil
respiration database (SRDB) a decade ago, a resource that has been widely used by the biogeochemistry community to advance our understanding of
RS dynamics. Novel carbon cycle science questions require updated and augmented global information with better interoperability among
datasets. Here, we restructured and updated the global RS database to version SRDB-V5. The updated version has all previous fields
revised for consistency and simplicity, and it has several new fields to include ancillary information (e.g., RS measurement time,
collar insertion depth, collar area). The new SRDB-V5 includes published papers through 2017 (800 independent studies), where total observations
increased from 6633 in SRDB-V4 to 10 366 in SRDB-V5. The SRDB-V5 features more RS data published in the Russian and Chinese scientific
literature and has an improved global spatio-temporal coverage and improved global climate space representation. We also restructured the database so
that it has stronger interoperability with other datasets related to carbon cycle science. For instance, linking SRDB-V5 with an hourly timescale
global soil respiration database (HGRsD) and a community database for continuous soil respiration (COSORE) enables researchers to explore new questions. The updated SRDB-V5 aims to be a data
framework for the scientific community to share seasonal to annual field RS measurements, and it provides opportunities for the
biogeochemistry community to better understand the spatial and temporal variability in RS, its components, and the overall carbon
cycle. The database can be downloaded at https://github.com/bpbond/srdb and will be made available in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Distributed Active Archive Center (ORNL DAAC). All data and code to reproduce the results in this study can be found at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3876443 (Jian and Bond-Lamberty, 2020).
