The Arctic Greening Database v0.1 is an open access database created as part of the ETH+ project "Unraveling biogeochemical, microbial and vegetation feedbacks driving soil development and Arctic greening under a warming climate". The database contains data on soil, vegetation, microbial, and environmental properties from 14 active-layer tundra sites sampled in 2022 and 2023 on Svalbard. The spatially-explicit field observations, field and laboratory measurements provides an interdisciplinary collection of data from a remote and data-poor region to study linkages between vegetation, microbiome and pedogenesis in the context of Arctic Greening.
The database is structured hierarchically with four connected levels: site, plot, sample, and species. At the site level, aggregated data are provided (e.g. GHG fluxes). This is followed by plot-level data (e.g. plant functional type cover) that connects to sample-level data (soil organic matter content) and species-level data. Tables at the same level are connected via one-to-one relationships, from a broader to finer level one-to-many relationships are in place. Sampling and measurement procedures are described in Section 2 of the database description. The metadata file accompanying a specific .csv file provides further information on data creation, sample processing and units. The current version of the dataset consists of a reduced set of tables that will be updated soon with more curated data from Svalbard and Northern Norway (Finnmark). A more extensive overview of the data will be published as a data paper in the future.