Wrangling carbon: Synthesizing multi-scale, multi-site observations across disparate data sets to advance models and understanding of soil carbon cycling

A working group studying soil organic matter dynamics is bringing together disparate data sets featuring soil organic matter measurements from investigators and networks such as NEON, CZO and LTER. The working group is aggregating these diverse data sets into a database with common vocabulary, units, and other metadata to provide investigators with information to evaluate the accuracy of soil biogeochemical models with a greater observational insight. The complexity and nuance of soil ecology studies present numerous challenges to synthesizing soil organic matter data. We discuss these challenges, and offer reflections that may improve the efficacy of future synthesis efforts.