The Northern Circumpolar Soil Carbon Database

Gridded GIS data (tiff-files)

The NCSCD is based on polygons from different regional soils maps homogenized to the U.S. Soil Taxonomy. The database contains information on fractions of coverage of different soil taxa as well as storage of soil organic carbon (hg/m²) between 0–300 cm depth. The data is stored as multiple tiff-files (one file per described parameter). There are separate zipped data-folders with: (1) merged circumpolar datasets at different spatial resolutions (grid sizes: 1°, 0.5°, 0.25°, 0.1°, 0.05° and 0.012°) (2) all regions in folders with files projected in the Lambert Azimuthal Equal Area (LAEA) projection and (grid size: 1000 m) (3) all regions in separate tiff-files with geographic latitude/longitude coordinates (WGS84; grid size: 0.012°).

Download data

Circum-arctic region

Regions (projected coordinates, LAEA)

Regions (geographic coordinates, WGS84)

Publications

For a detailed scientific description of the creation of the NCSCDv2 and the gridded dataset available see this paper published in the journal Earth System Science Data Discussion. Please refer to this paper if you make use of any dataset downloaded from this site:

A new data set for estimating organic carbon storage to 3 m depth in soils of the northern circumpolar permafrost region
Hugelius G., Bockheim J.G., Camill P., Elberling B., Grosse G., Harden J.W., Johnson K., Jorgenson T., Koven C.D., Kuhry P., Michaelson G., Mishra U., Palmtag J., Ping C.-L., O'Donnell J., Schirrmeister L., Schuur E.A.G., Sheng Y., Smith L.C., Strauss J. and Yu Z.
Earth System Science Data, Vol 5, pp. 393–402 (2013). DOI:10.5194/essd-5-393-2013

The Northern Circumpolar Soil Carbon Database: spatially distributed datasets of soil coverage and soil carbon storage in the northern permafrost regions
Hugelius, G., Tarnocai, C., Broll, G., Canadell, J. G., Kuhry, P., and Swanson, D. K.
Earth System Science Data, Vol 5, pp. 3–13 (2013). DOI:10.5194/essd-5-3-2013