Soil organic carbon, active layer depth and visible ground ice content for Herschel Island (Qikiqtaruk)

• Main Authors: Siewert, Matthias Benjamin, Lantuit, Hugues, Richter, Andreas, Hugelius, Gustaf
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2021
• Subjects: active layer depth; Arctic; ground ice; Ground-ice; HER; Herschel_Island; LATITUDE; LONGITUDE; MULT; Multiple investigations; Permafrost; Position; soil organic carbon; Soil organic carbon storage; Soil pedon; Soil subpedon; Terrain; Transect; UTM Easting; Universal Transverse Mercator; UTM Northing; Beaufort Sea; Herschel Island; Ice; permafrost; Tundra; wedge*
• Online Access: https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.927861; https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.927861

This dataset contains soil pedon data collected in 2015 on Herschel Island (Qikiqtaruk; 69°34′N, 138°55′W), Beaufort Sea, Canada. Large amounts of soil organic carbon (SOC) are stored in high-latitude ecosystems. Knowledge on storage and variability provides essential base information to asses the vulnerability of this SOC. In total 38 soil pedons were sampled along transects in three typical tundra terrain types common across the Arctic region. These terrain types (unit) are hummocky tussock upland tundra (HT-Tundra), non-sorted circles on upland tundra (NSC-Tundra) and ice-wedge polygon terrain (IWP-Tundra). A main transect was set up with increasing sampling distance from the center and complemented with a shorter crossing transect. This aimed to maximize the distances between individual soil pedons in order to test geostatistical properties of SOC variability. At each pedon location a 1 m wide soil pit was sampled and described using a soil horizon oriented approach. The soil pit was then divided in 10 cm intervals generating 11 sub-pedons. SOC storage was calculated for specific depth intervals SOC 0–30 cm, SOC 0–100 cm, SOCAL (SOC in active layer), SOCPF (SOC in permafrost), as well as the visible ice content for the permafrost section (mean_vis_ice). Additional data includes the depth of the permafrost table (depthPF) and the location of the sub-pedon within the periglacial landforms they occupy (landformLoc). For the active layer, the data was calculated based on perspective corrected images of the soil pit, while for the permafrost section homogeneous layering was applied.