The African Tropics are hotspots of modern-day land use change and are, at the same time, of great relevance for the cycling of carbon (C) and nutrients between plants, soils, and the atmosphere. However, the consequences of land conversion on biogeochemical cycles are still largely unknown as they are not studied in a landscape context that defines the geomorphic, geochemical, and pedological framework in which biological processes take place. Thus, the response of tropical soils to disturbance by erosion and land conversion is one of the great uncertainties in assessing the carrying capacity of tropical landscapes to grow food for future generations and in predicting greenhouse gas fluxes from soils to the atmosphere and, hence, future earth system dynamics.Here we describe version 1.0 of an open-access database created as part of the project “Tropical soil organic carbon dynamics along erosional disturbance gradients in relation to variability in soil geochemistry and land use” (TropSOC). TropSOC v1.0 (Doetterl et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.5880/fidgeo.2021.009) contains spatially and temporally explicit data on soil, vegetation, environmental properties, and land management collected from 136 pristine tropical forest and cropland plots between 2017 and 2020 as part of monitoring and sampling campaigns in the eastern Congo Basin and the East African Rift Valley system. The results of several laboratory experiments focusing on soil microbial activity, C cycling, and C stabilization in soils complement the dataset to deliver one of the first landscape-scale datasets to study the linkages and feedbacks between geology, geomorphology, and pedogenesis as controls on biogeochemical cycles in a variety of natural and managed systems in the African Tropics.The hierarchical and interdisciplinary structure of the TropSOC database allows linking of a wide range of parameters and observations on soil and vegetation dynamics along with other supporting information that may also be measured at one or more levels of the hierarchy. TropSOC's data mark a significant contribution to improve our understanding of the fate of biogeochemical cycles in dynamic and diverse tropical African (agro-)ecosystems. TropSOC v1.0 can be accessed through the Supplement provided as part of this paper or as a separate download via the websites of the Congo Biogeochemistry Observatory and GFZ Data Services where version updates to the database will be provided as the project develops.

中文翻译：

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沿非洲热带森林和农田地球化学、地貌和扰动梯度的有机质循环——项目 TropSOC 数据库版本 1.0

非洲热带地区是现代土地利用变化的热点，同时与植物、土壤和大气之间的碳 (C) 和养分循环具有重要意义。然而，土地转化对生物地球化学循环的影响在很大程度上仍然未知，因为它们没有在定义生物过程发生的地貌、地球化学和土壤学框架的景观背景下进行研究。因此，热带土壤对侵蚀和土地转化干扰的反应是评估热带景观为后代种植食物的承载能力和预测从土壤到大气的温室气体通量以及未来的最大不确定因素之一。地球系统动力学。在这里，我们描述了作为“与土壤地球化学和土地利用的变异性相关的侵蚀扰动梯度的热带土壤有机碳动态”（TropSOC）项目的一部分而创建的开放访问数据库的 1.0 版。TropSOC v1.0（Doetterl 等人，2021，https://doi.org/10.5880/fidgeo.2021.009）包含从 136 个原始热带森林和2017 年至 2020 年间的农田地块，作为刚果盆地东部和东非裂谷系统监测和采样活动的一部分。几个实验室实验的结果侧重于土壤微生物活动、碳循环、和土壤中的 C 稳定性补充数据集，以提供第一个景观尺度数据集之一，用于研究地质、地貌和成土之间的联系和反馈，作为对非洲热带地区各种自然和管理系统中生物地球化学循环的控制。 TropSOC 数据库的分层和跨学科结构允许将范围广泛的参数和对土壤和植被动态的观察与其他支持信息联系起来，这些信息也可以在一个或多个层次结构中进行测量。TropSOC 的数据标志着对提高我们对动态多样的热带非洲（农业）生态系统中生物地球化学循环命运的理解做出了重大贡献。TropSOC v1.