Semantics about soil organic carbon storage: DATA4C+, a comprehensive thesaurus and classification of management practices in agriculture and forestry

Abstract. Identifying the drivers of soil organic carbon (SOC) stock changes is of utmost importance to contribute to global challenges like climate change, land degradation, biodiversity loss or food security. Evaluating the impacts of land-use and management practices in agriculture and forestry on SOC is still challenging. Merging datasets or making databases interoperable is a promising way but still with several semantic challenges. So far, a comprehensive thesaurus and classification of management practices in agriculture and forestry is lacking, especially while focussing on SOC storage. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a first comprehensive thesaurus for management practices driving SOC storage (DATA4C+). The DATA4C+ thesaurus contains 226 classified and defined terms related to land management practices in agriculture and forestry. It is organized as a hierarchical tree reflecting the drivers of SOC storage. It is oriented to be used by scientists in agronomy, forestry and soil sciences with the aim of uniformizing the description of practices influencing SOC in their original research. It is accessible in Agroportal (http://agroportal.lirmm.fr/ontologies/DATA4CPLUS) to enhance its findability, accessibility, interoperability and re-use by scientists and others such as laboratories or land managers. Future uses of the DATA4C+ thesaurus will be crucial to improve and enrich it, but also to raise the quality of meta-analyses on SOC, and ultimately help policy-makers to identify efficient agricultural and forest management practices to enhance SOC storage.