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Data release for estimating soil respiration in a subalpine landscape using point, terrain, climate and greenness data

Metadata Updated: January 8, 2026

Landscape carbon (C) flux estimates are necessary for assessing the ability of terrestrial ecosystems to buffer further increases in anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Advances in remote sensing have allowed for coarse-scale estimates of gross primary productivity (GPP) (e.g., MODIS 17), yet efforts to assess spatial patterns in respiration lag behind those of GPP. Here, we demonstrate a method to predict growing season soil respiration at a regional scale in a forested ecosystem. We related field measurements (n=144) of growing season soil respiration across subalpine forests in the Southern Rocky Mountains ecoregion to a suite of biophysical predictors with a Random Forest model (30 m pixel size). We found that Landsat Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI), growing season AI, temperature, precipitation, elevation, and slope aspect explained spatiotemporal variability in soil respiration. Our model had a psuedo-r2 of 0.45 and root mean squared error (RMSE) of roughly one-quarter of the mean value of respiration. Predicted growing season soil respiration across the region was remarkably consistent across 2004, 2005 and 2006 (150-d averages of 542.8, 544.3, and 536.5 g C m-2, respectively). Yet, we observed substantial variability in spatial patterns of soil respiration predictions that varied between years, suggesting that our method is sensitive to changes in respiration drivers. We compared our estimates to MODIS GPP and nocturnal net ecosystem exchange (NEE) derived from eddy covariance towers as a proxy for ecosystem respiration. Averaged across the predictive region, mean predicted growing season soil respiration was 73% of MODIS GPP, while predicted soil respiration was generally within 20% of nocturnal NEE from eddy covariance towers. This study demonstrated that geospatial and remotely-sensed datasets can be used in a statistical modeling framework to estimate soil respiration at landscape scales.

Access & Use Information

Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

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Dates

Metadata Created Date January 8, 2026
Metadata Updated Date January 8, 2026

Metadata Source

Harvested from DOI USGS DCAT-US

Additional Metadata

Resource Type Dataset
Metadata Created Date January 8, 2026
Metadata Updated Date January 8, 2026
Publisher U.S. Geological Survey
Maintainer
Identifier http://datainventory.doi.gov/id/dataset/USGS_5b74a945e4b0f5d5787ed3b8
Data Last Modified 2024-01-18T00:00:00Z
Category geospatial
Public Access Level public
Bureau Code 010:12
Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
Metadata Catalog ID https://ddi.doi.gov/usgs-data.json
Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
Harvest Object Id 10c9ab94-7239-4621-9b98-18c16af7a38f
Harvest Source Id 2b80d118-ab3a-48ba-bd93-996bbacefac2
Harvest Source Title DOI USGS DCAT-US
Metadata Type geospatial
Old Spatial -110.410938, 35.026242, -103.679565, 43.387395
Source Datajson Identifier True
Source Hash 44b3c23c6675ccce5b376fad1a757e0c14c62e281b78a34012d060c168a27fc8
Source Schema Version 1.1
Spatial {"type": "Polygon", "coordinates": -110.410938, 35.026242, -110.410938, 43.387395, -103.679565, 43.387395, -103.679565, 35.026242, -110.410938, 35.026242}

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