Harmonized global soil carbon and respiration datasets with derived turnover time and temperature sensitivity

Soil carbon stocks and their release to the atmosphere are key processes for accurately predicting future climate-terrestrial carbon feedbacks. However, data-driven estimates of these variables exhibit substantial variability across studies. In this work, we compiled all publicly available global maps of soil carbon stock and heterotrophic respiration derived from observational data, converted them into NetCDF format, and standardized them to a 0.5-degree spatial resolution. We calculated the mean, maximum, and minimum values for each grid cell to generate harmonized global maps of both variables. From these harmonized datasets, we further derived estimates of soil carbon turnover time and its temperature sensitivity. The resulting products provide valuable benchmarks for the development, evaluation, and constraint of terrestrial carbon cycle models in Earth system science.