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.
To understand how climate change impacts the global carbon cycle, we need a mechanistic understanding of natural processes driving the capture, storage and release of CO2 within landscapes. Photosynthesis removes carbon from the atmosphere, and the organic carbon (OC) stored in vegetation, soils, and sediments can be eroded and subsequently transported by rivers to marine depocenters. During transport, OC can be stabilized and temporally stored in floodplains or oxidized and returned to the atmosphere as CO2. The balance of storage and release controls the floodplains net carbon budget. Recent research suggests that OC storage can exceed the CO2 release on aggradational floodplains of meandering rivers over millennia. However, direct measurements of the CO2 release from fluvial systems are rare and it remains unclear how geomorphic features, such as channel type and associated floodplain morphology as well as seasonality affect CO2 release.
This data set comprises measurements of CO2 fluxes, CO2 d13C values and source d13C values along morphological gradients and two seasons. We measured CO2 fluxes and corresponding d13C values on the catchment-scale in the Rio Bermejo foreland, northwestern Argentina, using a static, non-stationary accumulation chamber. We measured fluxes from the water surface, from sediment deposited on recently exposed riverbeds, on the overbanks, and in paleochannels, along braided and meandering river reaches, during a wet and a dry season. Our aim was to understand how regional-scale morphology and seasonality impact the CO2 fluxes in a foreland floodplain.