Environmental and human influences on organic carbon fractions down the soil profile

• Soil organic carbon fractions studied at 100 sites at depths >30 cm in Australia.
• Depth strongly influences all three SOC fractions.
• Association between POC and total SOC suggests that these soils are input driven.
• HOC and ROC are additionally influenced by physico-chemical soil characteristics.
• Land-use was not important to the SOC fractions down the whole profile.

We investigated the stability of whole profile soil organic carbon (SOC) based upon three mid-infrared predicted fractions – particulate organic carbon (POC), humus organic carbon (HOC) and resistant organic carbon (ROC) – at 100 sites across eastern Australia. Our aim was to identify the controls on SOC stability down the whole soil profile, in particular relating to climate, site and human influences. To do this we used three data-mining algorithms (randomForests, gradient boosting machines and multiplicative adaptive regression splines) to identify and assess the controls on the relative proportions of the three fractions down the soil profile. Depth was the key influence on all three fractions, with the proportion of POC decreasing, and the proportion of HOC carbon increasing with increasing depth. SOC was strongly linked with POC, suggesting that the soils in the region are input driven. HOC and ROC were controlled additionally by climate and soil physico-chemical properties (e.g. clay content, pH), with SOC being less important to these fractions. Human influences (land-use and management) were not important to the proportion of the fractions, implying that the controls humans can exert on SOC stability in these environments may be limited.