DOI: 10.5061/dryad.95x69p904
title: Data from: Global potential to increase soil carbon storage by reducing rotational fallow in semiarid regions

description: Intensification of cropping systems improves crop productivity and soil
 organic carbon (SOC) storage by maintaining or enhancing existing SOC
 stocks. We compiled published data on SOC changes in agricultural soils
 globally from experiments evaluating the impact of bare-fallow reduction
 to determine the change in SOC storage that results from management
 change. Soil organic C storage under continuous and
 fallow-containing systems for each site was statistically compared. For
 the net change in SOC on a per area or on a per area and year basis,
 statistical differences among soil types, texture classes, climatic
 factors [mean annual precipitation (P), potential evapotranspiration
 (PET), and ratio of P/PET], and duration of the management change were
 determined.
description: A literature search was carried out using the Web of Science and
 Scopus databases. A broader search string was used as “(fallow) AND (soil
 organic carbon OR soil organic C OR SOC OR soil carbon OR soil C)”. With
 this search string, a total of 5834 entries were identified: 4486 from Web
 of Science and 1348 from Scopus. There are many terms used for fallow in
 the literature. Only “rotational fallow” as part of regular crop rotation
 tailors the requisite. Thus, replacement of fallow with growing a crop
 shorter than maturity, such as “cover crop” or “green manure,” is
 excluded. We had a few additional criteria, including duration of field
 studies for longer than four years; soil depth of 15 cm or deeper;
 experimental design in which the difference in SOC stocks can be estimated
 between continuous annual crop rotations and crop rotations with fallow;
 and studies estimating SOC stocks or reporting SOC concentration and soil
 bulk density so that the stocks could be estimated. Out of the 5384
 articles identified in the search, there were 27 papers with 97 paired
 comparisons from Canada, 26 articles with 73 paired comparisons from the
 U.S.A., and 14 articles with 18 paired comparisons from other countries
 that met these criteria. A complete list of all studies with background
 information on citation, township, province/state, country,
 geo-coordinates, climatic properties (mean annual temperature,
 precipitation, and potential evapotranspiration), soil taxonomy, soil
 texture, crop rotations, replicate, tillage, fallow frequency, soil
 sampling depth, SOC stocks with fallow-based rotation and continuous
 cropping, net SOC stock change, and rate of SOC changes is provided here
 (Supporting Information SI Table 1).
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description: # Data from: Global potential to increase soil carbon storage by reducing
 rotational fallow in semiarid regions Dataset DOI:
 [10.5061/dryad.95x69p904](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.95x69p904) ##
 Description of the data and file structure Most fields on this
 Supplementary Information are self-explanatory: reference, country,
 geographical coordinate, province/state, township, climatic factors
 (annual mean) including precipitation (mm), air temperature (°C),
 potential evapotranspiration (mm), ratio of precipitation to potential
 evapotranspiration (unitless), soil taxonomy (Canadian/USA), soil texture,
 crop frequency (yr ^-1^), soil clay content (%), duration of study (yr),
 crop rotation, tillage practice, number of replicate, fallow frequency
 (fraction), soil sampling depth (cm), soil organic C stock (Mg C ha ^-1^),
 and net change in soil organic C (Mg C ha ^-1^). Tillage practice consists
 of conventional tillage (CT), reduced tillage (RT), and no-till (NT). NA
 is not available. The net change in SOC is calculated by the difference in
 SOC stock between crop rotations without and with fallow (Mg C ha ^-1^).
 The rate of SOC change is calculated in two ways: 1) based on each year of
 field study (kg C ha ^-1^ yr ^-1^ of study), and 2) based on each year or
 season of fallow reduction (kg C ha ^-1^ yr ^-1^ of fallow reduction).
 Values of "NA" mean 'Not Applicable' or missing data.
 ## Code/software OpenData.xlsx contains all data. OpenData.csv is a copy
 of these data, but without formatting and in an open format. ## Access
 information Other publicly accessible locations of the data: None Data was
 derived from the following sources: Literature search