Abstract. Soil structure in terms of the spatial arrangement of pores and solid is highly relevant for most physical, biochemical processes in soil. While this is known for long a scientific approach to quantify soil structural characteristics was also missing for long. This was due to its buried nature but also due to the three-dimensional complexity. During the last two decades, tools to acquire full 3D images of undisturbed soil became more and more available and a number of powerful software tools were developed to reduce the complexity to a set of meaningful numbers. However, the standardization of soil structure analysis for a better comparability of the results is not well developed and the accessibility of required computing facilities and software is still limited. At this stage we introduce an open access Soil Structure Library (https://structurelib.ufz.de/) which offers well-defined soil structure analyses for X-ray CT data sets uploaded by interested scientists. At the same time, the aim of this library is to serve as an open data source for real pore structures as developed in a wide spectrum of different soil types under different site conditions all over the globe. By combining pore structure metrics with essential soil information requested during upload (e.g. bulk density, texture, organic carbon content\ldots), this Soil Structure Library can be harnessed towards data mining and development of soil structure based pedotransfer functions. In this paper we describe the architecture of the Soil Structure Library and the provided metrics. This is complemented by an example how the data base can be used to address new research questions.

中文翻译：

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基于X射线CT数据的开放土壤结构库

摘要。就孔隙和固体的空间排列而言，土壤结构与土壤中的大多数物理、生化过程高度相关。虽然这早已为人所知，但长期缺乏量化土壤结构特征的科学方法。这是由于其被掩埋的性质，也由于其三维复杂性。在过去的二十年中，获取未受干扰土壤的完整 3D 图像的工具变得越来越可用，并且开发了许多强大的软件工具以将复杂性降低到一组有意义的数字。然而，为了获得更好的结果可比性，土壤结构分析的标准化还没有得到很好的发展，所需的计算设施和软件的可访问性仍然有限。在这个阶段，我们引入了一个开放获取土壤结构库(https://structurelib.ufz.de/) 为感兴趣的科学家上传的 X 射线 CT 数据集提供定义明确的土壤结构分析。同时，该库的目的是作为一个开放数据源，用于在全球不同场地条件下在广泛的不同土壤类型中开发的真实孔隙结构。通过将孔隙结构指标与上传期间要求的基本土壤信息（例如体积密度、质地、有机碳含量\ldots）相结合，该土壤结构库可用于数据挖掘和开发基于土壤结构的 pedotransfer 函数。在本文中，我们描述了土壤结构库的架构以及提供的指标。还通过一个示例补充了如何使用数据库来解决新的研究问题。