EMSLs 1000 Soils Project: core collection strategy and data types available

The 1000 Soils Project at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a DOE Office of Science User Facility for Environmental System Science Research, will collect paired soil cores from across North America to assess continental-scale patterns in relationships between the chemistry, microbiology, and soil structure at the near surface (organic layer) and the lower portion (mineral layer) of the soil profile. This effort seeks to develop the necessary fundamental database to enable robust parameterization of terrestrial carbon cycle components and improve predictive skill of local-to-continental scale modeling efforts by implementing consistent sample metadata capture, field sampling, analytic measurements, and data analysis protocols. The database of molecularly resolved soil organic matter (SOM) composition, microbial community structure and functional potential (metagenomes sequenced at DOEs Joint Genome Institute), and soil structure and hydrologic properties that drive SOM decomposition and/or stabilization. These data are key to the parameterization of hierarchical, multi-scale models beginning with microbially-explicit models at site scale and culminating in Earth System Models (ESM) at global scales. Initial cores will be collected in partnership with DOEs AmeriFlux and NSFs NEON research networks to enable investigators to integrate the complementary databases. In the near future, we will accept contributed cores through a streamlined submission process with an anticipated focus on northern latitude and semi-arid regions and/or other under-represented/poorly sampled geographic locations. The poster will describe the analysis workflow and the datatypes that will be included in the 1000 soils database.