Archived data from Northern Circumpolar Soil Carbon Database

The spatial base of the NCSCD is a polygon database describing soils in the northern circumpolar permafrost regions. The database was compiled by combining and homogenizing several regional/national soil maps.

To calculate storage of soil organic carbon, these soil maps have been linked to field-data on soil organic carbon storage from a total of 1,647 sites from around the circumpolar permafrost region. The NCSCD contains information on fractions of coverage of different soil types (following U.S. Soil Taxonomy nomenclature) as well as storage of soil organic carbon (kg/m2) between 0-30 cm and 0-100 cm depth. The NCSCD is available either as a polygon-based database (which is the original format) or converted to gridded data.