Digital mapping of soil organic carbon hotspots in nature conservation areas in the region of Flanders, Belgium

Climate-smart land management offers an opportunity to reconcile biodiversity goals with climate change mitigation. An important first step towards this, is an accurate estimate of the soil organic carbon (SOC) stock and the identification of locations with a large share in storage. General-purpose, regional assessments are not always useful to identify such hotspots, since they tend to even out extremes of SOC stocks in the landscape. The objectives of this study were to (i) develop and validate a digital soil mapping procedure to assess the SOC stock of nature conservation areas in Flanders, N. Belgium, and (ii) identify soil carbon hotspots in these areas. To this end, different soil inventories, encompassing 864 soil profiles, were combined in a digital soil mapping approach.