High resolution characterization of the soil organic carbon depth profile in a soil landscape affected by erosion

• Our methodology allows to derive and predict high resolution vertical SOC profiles.
• The parameters of the SOC profile model are related to topography and erosion.
• SOC surface content is mainly controlled by erosion processes.
• SOC profile prediction was improved by adding information on the SOC surface content.

The identification of soil management strategies as well as the evaluation of their effectiveness requires detailed information on the spatial and temporal patterns of soil organic carbon storage. High-resolution SOC profile data are generally not available and traditional methods for collecting these are time consuming and costly. Recent studies use geo-statistical approaches to assess the three-dimensional patterns of SOC storage. However, there is still a large discrepancy between the continuous and high resolution mapping of the horizontal SOC variability on the one hand, and the coarse and discontinuous mapping of the vertical SOC profile on the other. In this study, we combine spectroscopic techniques with spatial modeling in a small, cultivated catchment in Germany and we evaluate the contribution of soil redistribution processes and topographical parameters to the observed spatial and vertical patterns. Using high-resolution data from soil cores, we evaluated the robustness of a third order polynomial function to model the vertical SOC profile. Using a crossvalidation, our results show that this approach results in a robust model (RSME = 0.24%) and performs better than the widely used exponential depth model (RMSE = 0.39%). In a next step, we evaluated the relationship between the parameters of the SOC depth model and co-variables including soil redistribution (inferred from 137Cs data) and topographical indices using a multiple linear regression model. The performance was calculated by cross-validation and we found a low robustness of the models because of the low number of profiles (i.e. n = 19). A statistical evaluation of the co-variables highlighted two key factors influencing the SOC vertical distribution. Soil redistribution processes mainly influenced the surface SOC content (first centimeters) whereas the shape of the depth distribution was controlled by slope curvature alone. The mapping of polynomial parameters was validated using an external SOC profile dataset and showed a poor prediction of the surface content but a good prediction of the depth distribution once the surface SOC content is known (RMSE = 0.15–0.25%C). This suggests that estimating the vertical SOC profile from topsoil data by applying remote sensing data, in combination with our SOC profile model, is promising and can will result in an accurate mapping of 3D SOC patterns at a very high resolution.