COSORE: A community database for continuous soil respiration and other soil-atmosphere greenhouse gas flux data

Authors: BOND-LAMBERTY, BEN - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; CHRISTIANSON, DANIELLE - Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; MALHOTRA, AVRIL - Stanford University; PENNINGTON, STEPHANIE - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; SIHI, DEBJANI - Emory University; AGHAKOUCHAK, AMIR - University Of California; ANJILELI, HASSAN - University Of California; ARAIN, M. ATLAF - McMaster University; ARMESTO, JUAN - Pontifical Catholic University Of Chile; ASHRAF, SAMANEH - Concordia University; Phillips, Claire

Submitted to: Global Change Biology
Publication Type: Peer Reviewed Journal
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/4/2020
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary: The soil-to-atmosphere CO2 flux, commonly termed soil respiration, is one of the largest carbon fluxes in the Earth system, and therefore influences atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. An increasing number of continuously measured soil CO2 and CH4 fluxes have been collected globally over the last two decades, but have not been gathered in a central database or repository. This manuscript describes a new open-source database for such data, called COSORE (COntinuous SOil REspiration). The COSORE database currently has 89 contributed datasets with a total of 8.1 million soil flux observations across 20 years and five continents.

Technical Abstract: Globally, soils store two to three times as much carbon as currently resides in the atmosphere, and it is critical to understand how soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uptake will respond to ongoing climate change. In particular, the soil-to-atmosphere CO2 flux, commonly though imprecisely termed soil respiration (RS) is one of the largest carbon fluxes in the Earth system. An increasing number of high frequency RS measurements (typically, from an automated system with hourly sampling) have been made over the last two decades; an increasing number of methane measurements are being made with such systems as well. Such high frequency data are an invaluable resource for understanding GHG fluxes, but lack a central database or repository. Here we describe the lightweight, open source COSORE (COntinuous SOil REspiration) database and software, that focuses on automated, continuous and long-term GHG flux datasets, and is intended to serve as a community resource for earth sciences, climate change syntheses, and model evaluation. Contributed datasets are mapped to a single, consistent standard, with metadata on contributors, geographic location, measurement conditions, and ancillary data. The design emphasizes the importance of reproducibility, scientific transparency, and open access to data. While oriented towards continuously measured RS, the database design accommodates other soil-atmosphere measurements (e.g. ecosystem respiration, chamber-measured net ecosystem exchange, methane fluxes) as well as experimental treatments (heterotrophic only, etc.). We give brief examples of the types of analyses possible using this new community resource and describe its accompanying R software package.