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Soil and Landscape Grid National Soil Attribute Maps - Organic Carbon (1" resolution) - Release 1

This is Version1 of the Australian Soil Organic Carbon product of the Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia at 30&nbsp;m resolution.<br /><br />


The map gives a modeled estimate of the spatial distribution of total organic carbon in soils across Australia.<br /><br />


<p>The Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia has produced a range of digital soil attribute products. Each product contains six digital soil attribute maps, and their upper and lower confidence limits, representing the soil attribute at six depths: 0-5&nbsp;cm, 5-15&nbsp;cm, 15-30&nbsp;cm, 30-60&nbsp;cm, 60-100&nbsp;cm and 100-200&nbsp;cm. These depths are consistent with the specifications of the GlobalSoilMap.net project- https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SLGA/Resources/GlobalSoilMap_specifications_december_2015_2.pdf . The digital soil attribute maps are in raster format at a resolution of 3 arc sec (~90 x 90&nbsp;m pixels).</p>


Detailed information about the Soil and Landscape Grid of Australia can be found at - <a href=" https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SLGA/index.html ">SLGA</a><br /><br />


<ul style="list-style-type: disc;"><li>Attribute Definition: Mass fraction of carbon by weight in the < 2 mm soil material as determined by dry combustion at 900 Celsius;</li>

<li>Units: %;</li>

<li>Period (temporal coverage; approximately): 1970-2021;</li>

<li>Spatial resolution: 1 arc seconds (approx 30&nbsp;m);</li>

<li>Total number of gridded maps for this attribute: 18;</li>

<li>Number of pixels with coverage per layer: 2007M (49200 * 40800);</li>

<li>Target data standard: GlobalSoilMap specifications;</li>

<li>Format: Cloud Optimised GeoTIFF.</li></ul>

Simple

Identification info

Date (Creation)
2022-07-27
Date (Publication)
2022-10-31
Date (Revision)
2025-12-10
Edition
1.0

Identifier

Title
DataCite
Code
doi:10.25919/5qjv-7s27
Codespace
http://dx.doi.org

Publisher

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
+61 7 3365 9097

Author

University of Sydney - Wadoux, Alexandre ()
City Road, Camperdown, New South Wales, 2050, Australia
Camperdown
New South Wales
2050
Australia

Co-author

Sydney Institute of Agriculture, University of Sydney - Dobarco, Mercedes ()
380 Werombi Road, Camden, New South Wales, 2570, Australia
Camden
New South Wales
2570
Australia

Co-author

CSIRO Land and Water (2014-2022) - Malone, Brendan ()
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia

Co-author

Sydney Institute of Agriculture, University of Sydney - Minasny, Budiman ()
380 Werombi Road, Camden, New South Wales, 2570, Australia
Camden
New South Wales
2570
Australia

Co-author

Sydney Institute of Agriculture, University of Sydney - McBratney, Alex (Director - Sydney Institute of Agriculture, Professor of Digital Agriculture & Soil Science)
380 Werombi Road, Camden, New South Wales, 2570, Australia
Camden
New South Wales
2570
Australia

Co-author

CSIRO Agriculture and Food - Searle, Ross (Senior Experimental Scientist)
Waite Road, Waite, South Australia, 5064, Australia
Waite
South Australia
5064
Australia

Collaborator

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia

Collaborator

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
80 Meiers Road, Indooroopilly, Queensland, 4068, Australia
Indooroopilly
Queensland
4068
Australia

Collaborator

University of Sydney
City Road, Camperdown, New South Wales, 2050, Australia
Camperdown
New South Wales
2050
Australia

Collaborator

Geoscience Australia
101 Jerrabomberra Avenue, Symonston, 2609, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Symonston
Australian Capital Territory
2609
Australia

Collaborator

Department of Land Resource Management (2012-2016), Northern Territory Government
25 Chung Wah Terrace, Palmerston, Northern Territory, 0830, Australia
Palmerston
Northern Territory
0830
Australia

Collaborator

Office of Environment and Heritage (2011-2019), New South Wales
4 Parramatta Square, 12 Darcy Street, Parramatta, 2150, New South Wales, Australia
Parramatta
New South Wales
2150
Australia

Collaborator

Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts (2012-2015), Queensland Government
400 George Street, Brisbane, Queensland, 4000, Australia
Brisbane
Queensland
4000
Australia

Collaborator

Department of Environment, Water and Natural Resources (2012-2018), South Australian Government
81-95 Waymouth Street, Adelaide, South Australia, 5000, Australia
Adelaide
South Australia
5000
Australia

Collaborator

Department of Primary Industries, Parks, Water and Environment, Tasmanian Government
59 Liverpool Street, Hobart, Tasmania, 7000, Australia
Hobart
Tasmania
7000
Australia

Collaborator

Department of Environment and Primary Industries (2013-2015), Victorian Government
8 Nicholson Street, Melbourne, Victoria, 3000, Australia
Melbourne
Victoria
3000
Australia

Collaborator

Department of Agriculture and Food (2006-2017), Western Australian Government
3 Baron-Hay Court South Perth Western Australia 6151, Australia
South Perth
Western Australia
6151
Australia
Website
https://www.tern.org.au/

Purpose
The aim is to operate an open national capability that provides access to verified, science-quality land surface dynamics data and soils information layers, plus high-end data analytics tools that integrated with other TERN observations can meet the needs of ecosystem researchers and actionable information for policy makers and natural resource managers.
Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Credit
<p></p>This work was jointly funded by CSIRO, Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) and the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).<br> We are grateful to the custodians of the soil site data in each state and territory for providing access to the soil site data, and all of the organisations listed as collaborating agencies for their significant contributions to the project and its outcomes.<br>
Status
Completed

Point of contact

University of Sydney - Wadoux, Alexandre ()
City Road, Camperdown, New South Wales, 2050, Australia
City Road
Camperdown
New South Wales
2050
Australia

Spatial resolution

Spatial resolution
30
Topic category
  • Environment
  • Geoscientific information

Extent

N
S
E
W


Temporal extent

Time period
1970-01-01 2022-07-27
Title
Wadoux, A. M. J. C., Román Dobarco, M., Malone, B., Minasny, B., McBratney, A. B., & Searle, R. (2023). Baseline high-resolution maps of organic carbon content in Australian soils. Scientific Data 2023 10:1, 10(1), 1–10.
Website
Wadoux, A. M. J. C., Román Dobarco, M., Malone, B., Minasny, B., McBratney, A. B., & Searle, R. (2023). Baseline high-resolution maps of organic carbon content in Australian soils. Scientific Data 2023 10:1, 10(1), 1–10.

Related documentation

Maintenance and update frequency
Not planned
GCMD Science Keywords
  • SOILS
  • AGRICULTURE
  • LAND SURFACE
ANZSRC Fields of Research
  • Agricultural land management
  • Agricultural spatial analysis and modelling
  • Soil sciences
  • Soil sciences not elsewhere classified
TERN Parameter Vocabulary
  • soil organic carbon
  • Percent
QUDT Units of Measure
  • Percent
GCMD Horizontal Resolution Ranges
  • 1 meter - < 30 meters
GCMD Temporal Resolution Ranges
  • Decadal
Keywords (Discipline)
  • TERN_Soils
  • TERN_Soils_DSM
  • Raster
  • Attributes
  • Continental
  • Australia
  • DSM
  • Global Soil Map
  • spatial modelling
  • 3-dimensional soil mapping
  • spatial uncertainty
  • Soil Maps
  • Digital Soil Mapping
  • SLGA
  • Organic Carbon

Resource constraints

Use limitation
The Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license allows others to copy, distribute, display, and create derivative works provided that they credit the original source and any other nominated parties. Details are provided at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
File name
88x31.png
File description
CCBy Logo from creativecommons.org
File type
png
Linkage
https://w3id.org/tern/static/cc-by/88x31.png

Title
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence
Alternate title
CC-BY
Edition
4.0
Website
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Access constraints
License
Use constraints
Other restrictions
Other constraints
<br></br>TERN services are provided on an "as-is" and "as available" basis. Users use any TERN services at their discretion and risk. They will be solely responsible for any damage or loss whatsoever that results from such use including use of any data obtained through TERN and any analysis performed using the TERN infrastructure. Web links to and from external, third party websites should not be construed as implying any relationships with and/or endorsement of the external site or its content by TERN. <br></br>Please advise any work or publications that use this data via the online form at https://www.tern.org.au/research-publications/#reporting <br><br> Please cite this dataset as {Author} ({PublicationYear}). {Title}. {Version, as appropriate}. Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. Dataset. {Identifier}.

Resource constraints

Classification
Unclassified

Distribution Information

Distribution format

Distributor

Distributor

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
80 Meiers Road, Indooroopilly, Queensland, 4068, Australia
Indooroopilly
Queensland
4068
Australia
OnLine resource
Cloud Optimised GeoTIFFs - Organic Carbon (1" resolution) - Release 1

OnLine resource
Landscape Data Visualiser - Organic Carbon (1" resolution) - Release 1

OnLine resource
SOC_30m_v1

SLGA Organic Carbon (1" resolution) - Release 1

OnLine resource
ro-crate-metadata.json

Distribution Information

Distribution format

Distributor

Distributor

Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation
147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, 6014, Western Australia, Australia
Floreat
Western Australia
6014
Australia
OnLine resource
File Naming Convention

Resource lineage

Statement
Data on total organic carbon (TOC) concentration (%) was extracted with the Soil Data Federator- https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SoilDataFederator/SoilDataFederatorHelp.html managed by CSIRO. The Soil Data Federator is a web API that compiles soil data from different institutions and government agencies throughout Australia. The laboratory methods for total organic carbon included in the study are 6A1, 6A1_UC, 6B2, 6B2b, 6B3, 6B3a. We selected TOC data from the period 1970-2020 to get a compromise between representativity of current TOC concentration and spatial coverage. The data was cleaned and processed to harmonize units, exclude duplicates and potentially wrong data entries (e.g. missing upper or lower horizon depths, extreme TOC values, unknown sampling date). Additional TOC measurements from the Biome of Australian Soil Environments (BASE) contextual data (Bisset et al., 2016) were also included in the analyses. TOC concentration for BASE samples was determined by the Walkley-Black method (method 6A1). Upper limits for TOC concentration by biome and land cover classes were set according to published literature, consistent datasets (Australian national Soil Carbon Research Program (SCaRP) and BASE, and data exploration to exclude unrealistic TOC values (e.g. maximum TOC = 30% in temperate forests, maximum TOC = 14% in temperate rainfed pasture). Since TOC concentration in Australian ecosystems has been underestimated by previous SOC maps, we did not set conservative TOC upper limits, knowing that machine learning model would likely underestimate high SOC values.<br></br> <p>The equal-area quadratic spline function were fitted to the whole collection of pre-processed TOC data, and then values extracted for the 0-5&nbsp;cm, 5-15&nbsp;cm, 15-30&nbsp;cm, 30-60&nbsp;cm, 60-100&nbsp;cm, and 100-200&nbsp;cm depth intervals, following GlobalSoilMap specifications (Arrouays et al., 2014) Boxplots with TOC values by biome and land cover after data cleaning and depth standardization are shown in Figure 1.</p> <p>Covariates: We collected a set of 57 spatially exhaustive environmental covariates covering Australia and representing proxies for factors influencing SOC formation and spatial distribution: soil properties, climate, organisms/vegetation, relief and parent material/age. The covariates were re-projected to WGS84 (EPSG:4326) projection and cropped to the same spatial extent. All covariates were resampled using billinear interpolation or aggregated to conform with a spatial resolution with grid cell of 90&nbsp;m x 90&nbsp;m.</p> Mapping: The spatial distribution of soil TOC concentration is driven by the combined influence of climate, vegetation, relief and parent materials. We thus modelled TOC concentration as a function of environmental covariates representing biotic and abiotic control of TOC. The measurement of SOC and their corresponding value of environmental covariate at same measurement locations were used to fit the mapping model. For the mapping we used a machine learning model called quantile regression forest.<br></br> <p>Mapping is made with Quantile regression forest, which is similar to the popular random forest algorithm for mapping. Instead of obtaining a single statistic, that is the mean prediction from the decision trees in the random forest, we report all the target values of the leaf node of the decision trees. With QRF, the prediction is thus not a single value but a cumulative distribution of the TOC prediction at each location, which can be used to compute empirical quantile estimates.</p> All processing for the generation of these products was undertaken using the R programming language. R Core Team (2020).<br></br> <ul style="list-style-type: disc;"><li>Code - <a href="https://github.com/AusSoilsDSM/SLGA">https://github.com/AusSoilsDSM/SLGA</a></li> <li>Observation data - <a href="https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SoilDataFederator/SoilDataFederator.html">https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SoilDataFederator/SoilDataFederator.html></a></li> <li>Covariate rasters - <a href="https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SLGA/GetData-COGSDataStore.html">https://esoil.io/TERNLandscapes/Public/Pages/SLGA/GetData-COGSDataStore.html</a></li></ul>
Hierarchy level
Dataset
Title
Methods Summary - Total Soil Organic Carbon Content
Website
https://aussoilsdsm.esoil.io/slga-version-2-products/total-soil-organic-carbon-content

Method documentation

Title
Arrouays, D., McBratney, A. B., Minasny, B., Hempel, J. W., Heuvelink, G. B. M., MacMillan, R. A., ... & McKenzie, N. J. (2014). The GlobalSoilMap project specifications. GlobalSoilMap: Basis of the global spatial soil information system, 9-12.
Website
https://www.fao.org/3/br957e/br957e.pdf

Method documentation

Title
R Core Team (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria
Website
https://www.R-project.org/

Method documentation

Title
Bissett, A., Fitzgerald, A., Meintjes, T., Mele, P. M., Reith, F., Dennis, P. G., ... & Young, A. (2016). Introducing BASE: the Biomes of Australian Soil Environments soil microbial diversity database. GigaScience, 5(1), s13742-016.
Website
https://doi.org/10.1186/s13742-016-0126-5

Method documentation

Reference System Information

Reference system identifier
EPSG/EPSG:4326

Reference system type
Geodetic Geographic 2D

Metadata

Metadata identifier
urn:uuid/99220138-019d-4157-abcb-07a3678f0e19

Title
TERN GeoNetwork UUID

Language
English
Character encoding
UTF8

Point of contact

Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network
Building 1019, 80 Meiers Rd
Indooroopilly
QLD
4068
Australia
+61 7 3365 9097

Type of resource

Resource scope
Dataset
Metadata linkage
https://geonetwork.tern.org.au/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/99220138-019d-4157-abcb-07a3678f0e19

Point-of-truth metadata URL

Date info (Creation)
2021-08-10T00:00:00.000000+00:00
Date info (Revision)
2025-12-10T10:07:44.432635+00:00

Metadata standard

Title
ISO 19115-1:2014/AMD 1:2018 Geographic information - Metadata - Fundamentals
Edition
1

Metadata standard

Title
ISO/TS 19115-3:2016
Edition
1.0

Metadata standard

Title
ISO/TS 19157-2:2016
Edition
1.0
Title
Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) Metadata Profile of ISO 19115-3:2016 and ISO 19157-2:2016
Date (published)
2021
Edition
1.0

Identifier

Code
10.5281/zenodo.5652221
Website
https://github.com/ternaustralia/TERN-ISO19115/releases/tag/v1.0

 
 

Overviews

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Spatial extent

N
S
E
W


Keywords

ANZSRC Fields of Research
Agricultural land management Agricultural spatial analysis and modelling Soil sciences Soil sciences not elsewhere classified
GCMD Science Keywords
AGRICULTURE LAND SURFACE SOILS

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