SERENA EJP SOIL: Soil organic carbon concentration map for the topsoil of Hungary (2016)

The internal EJP SOIL project SERENA contributed to the evaluation of soil multifunctionality aiming at providing assessment tools for land planning and soil policies at different scales. By co-working with relevant stakeholders, the project provided co-developed indicators and associated cookbooks to assess and map them, to report both on soil degradation, soil-based ecosystem services and their bundles, under actual conditions and for climate and land-use changes, at the regional, national, and European scales. The data was prepared according to the methodology of SERENA SOC loss cookbook for the territory of Hungary. To compile the soil organic carbon map, soil organic carbon (0-30 cm, year 2016) data of the Hungarian Soil Information and Monitoring System (SIMS) were used, which are not publicly available. The selection of environmental covariates, which are then used to model and map SOC content, was based on the ‘scorpan’ model: (s) soil properties, (c) climate, (o) organisms, (r) relief, (p) parent material, (a) age and (n) spatial coordinates. The following covariates were used: soil type map of Hungary (Pásztor et al., 2018); long-term mean annual evapotranspiration, -evaporation, -precipitation, and -temperature (Szentimrey et al., 2007); CORINE Land Cover 2012; EU-DEM and derivatives; Geological map of Hungary (Gyalog & Síkhegyi, 2005). Random forest kriging (RFK, combination of the random forest machine learning algorithm and the kriging technique) was used for the prediction of the SOC concentration.