Abstract
Soil organic carbon (SOC) models need independent evaluation against field measurements, but those latter are rarely publicly available and harmonized. In this study, we collected and shared data from 167 agronomic treatments in 34 agronomic long-term experiments (LTEs) located in temperate croplands, allowing the evaluation of several soil organic C models such as RothC, Century, AMG, MIMICS, ICBM, Millenial, and CTOOL. The dataset includes climate data, soil properties, C inputs from crops (n = 4588 records) and organic amendments, irrigation data, monthly soil cover, as well as SOC stock measurements in the topsoil layer (n = 1328 records). Climate, soil moisture, and soil temperature data were extracted from daily climate databases. Carbon inputs from crops were calculated from observed yields and harvest index, with some harvest index values estimated, combined with crop allometric coefficients from the literature. Descriptions of LTE, agronomic treatments, methodological metadata, and a part of the code, accompanies the dataset. The dataset can be reused to evaluate single SOC models, or to evaluate an ensemble of models.
Data availability
The dataset is accessible from a ZIP archive deposited on Recherche Data Gouv59: https://doi.org/10.57745/WKQHW2.
Code availability
Several R scripts are provided in the code folder of the dataset. Scripts for climate data extraction, aggregation and formatting from SAFRAN (get_safran_data_geosas_api.R), ERA5 & ERA5-Land (get_ERA5_data_openmeteo.R), Rothamsted dataset (climate_data_broadbalk.R) are provided and can be used to reproduce the climate tables, and soil moisture and temperature tables. The final tables are generated with merge_climate_data.R.
The calculation of C inputs from observed data (yields and HI) can be found in the c_input_calculation.R file. The dataset_check.R script reproduces the checking of the dataset. Description of the dataset including code for the figures used in this paper is found in the dataset_desc.Rmd file. The R version used was 4.5.1. The R environment used in this work was encapsulated with the renv package, ensuring code reproducibility within a Rstudio project. This R environment can be restored by running the setup.R script.
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Acknowledgements
This work is part of project ALAMOD of the exploratory research program FairCarboN and received government funding managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche under the France 2030 program, reference ANR-22-PEXF-0002. We thank the IMMORTAL project, funded by a joint CNRS/INRAE call for proposals « Cycle du carbone dans les écosystèmes terrestres ». We thank Rothamsted Research for information and data from the e-RA database. The Rothamsted Long-Term Experiments - National Bioscience Research Infrastructure (RLTE-NBRI) is funded by the UK Research and Innovation - Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (UKRI-BBSRC) under award BBS/E/RH/23NB0007 (2023-2028). The RLTE-NBRI is also supported by the Lawes Agricultural Trust. Support for this research was also provided by the USDA Long-Term Agroecosystem Research (LTAR) Program and the NSF Long-Term Ecological Research Program (DEB 2224712) at the Kellogg Biological Station, and by Michigan State University AgBioResearch. We also thank the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences for supporting the maintenance of the Swedish LTEs including the associated database and soil sample archive. USDA-ARS Material Transfer Agreement #18655. USDA is an equal opportunity provider and employer. Mention of trade names or commercial products in this publication does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The QualiAgro, PROspective and EFELE experiments are part of the SOERE-PRO (network of long-term experiments dedicated to the study of the impact of the recycling of organic waste products) and are integrated as a service of the “Investment in the Future” infrastructure AnaEE-France, overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR-11-INBS-0001). The QualiAgro experiment was founded and is still supported by INRAE and Veolia. The PROspective experiment was founded and is still supported by INRAE and SMRA68. The La Cage and the 42 plots experiments at Versailles were created and are supported by INRAE.The Lusignan experiment is part of the SOERE-ACBB (French national observatory on Agroecosystems, Biogeochemical Cycles and Biodiversity) and is integrated as a service of the “Investment in the Future” infrastructure AnaEE-France, overseen by the French National Research Agency (ANR-11-INBS-0001). It was founded and is still supported by INRAE. Rés0Pest is an experimental network of zero-pesticide farming systems for field crops and mixed farming, comprising nine sites and which aims to generate knowledge that can be used to design innovative, pesticide-efficient farming systems. We acknowledge Hubert Boizard, Pascal Cocandeau, Caroline Colnenne-David, Marie-Laure Decau, Pascal Deneroy, Christophe Desvignes, Rosemonde Devaux, Jérôme Guérif, Claire Jouany, Dominique Le Floch, Emilie Mignot, Christian Morel, Brice Mosa, Bernard Nicolardot, Bernard Nicoullaud, Daniel Plenet, Guy Richard, Véronique Tanneau, and Eric Venet, for their contribution to site management and/or data collection in the LTE of the dataset. We thank Andy Geschwendtas and Mingming Zong for support of the SOC fractionation.
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Kenji Fujisaki – project conception, data processing, data validation, data analysis, original draft writing. Fabien Ferchaud – project conception, data processing, data validation, data acquisition. Hugues Clivot – project conception, data processing, data validation. Elisa Bruni – project conception, data validation. Bertrand Guenet - project conception, data validation. Christian Pichot – project conception, data validation. Antoine Versini – project conception. François Baudin – data collection, data processing. Antonio Bispo – project conception, data validation. Manuel P. Martin – project conception, data validation. Johannes L. Jensen – site management, data acquisition. Jørgen Eriksen – site management, data acquisition. Claire Chenu – site management, data acquisition. Andrew S. Gregory – site management, data acquisition. Margaret J. Glendining – data acquisition, data processing. Ines Merbach – site management, data acquisition. Nicolas Beaudoin – site management, data acquisition. Bruno Mary – site management, data acquisition, data processing. Alain Mollier – site management, data acquisition. Gilles Tison – site management, data acquisition. Christophe Montagnier – site management, data acquisition. Abad Chabbi – site management, data acquisition. Françoise Vertes – site management, data acquisition. Alice Cadéro – data processing. Anne-Isabelle Graux – data processing. Sylvain Pellerin – site management, data acquisition. Florent Levavasseur – site management, data acquisition, data processing. Manon Gilles – site management, data acquisition. Thierry Morvan – site management, data acquisition. Camille Resseguier – site management, data acquisition. Luis Milesi – site management, data acquisition. Alicia Irizar – site management, data acquisition. Adriàn Andriulo – site management, data acquisition. Marie-Noël Mistou – site management, data acquisition. Arnaud Butier – site management, data acquisition. Michel Bertrand – site management, data acquisition. Bénédicte Autret – data acquisition, data processing. Marie-Hélène Jeuffroy – site management, data acquisition. Gilles Grandeau – site management, data acquisition. Thierry Doré – site management, data acquisition. Vincent Cellier – site management, data acquisition, data processing. Alain Berthier – site management, data acquisition. Sébastien Darras – site management, data acquisition. Guillaume Audebert – site management, data acquisition. Ludovic Pasquier – site management, data acquisition. Fabien Ecalle – site management, data acquisition. Antoine Savoie – site management, data acquisition. Marcus Schiedung – data acquisition, data validation. Christopher Poeplau – data acquisition. Nadia I. Maaroufi – site management, data acquisition. Thomas Kätterer – data acquisition, data processing. Martin A. Bolinder – data acquisition, data processing. Jonathan Sanderman – site management, data collection, data processing. Pierre Barré – project conception, data processing, data validation.
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Fujisaki, K., Ferchaud, F., Clivot, H. et al. Data from long-term experiments in temperate croplands to evaluate soil organic carbon models. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06863-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-06863-7
