Articles | Volume 3, issue 1
https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-3-61-2017
https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-3-61-2017
Short communication
 | 
13 Mar 2017
Short communication |  | 13 Mar 2017

Soil organic carbon stocks are systematically overestimated by misuse of the parameters bulk density and rock fragment content

Christopher Poeplau, Cora Vos, and Axel Don

Data sets

SOIL data C. Poeplau https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/N8W9J

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Short summary
This paper shows that three out of four frequently used methods to calculate soil organic carbon stocks lead to systematic overestimation of those stocks. Stones, which can be assumed to be free of carbon, have to be corrected for in both bulk density and layer thickness. We used data of the German Agricultural Soil Inventory to illustrate the potential bias and suggest a unified and unbiased calculation method for stocks of soil organic carbon, which is the largest terrestrial carbon pool.