0 cmSurface
Sebangau, Central Kalimantan
Everything below this line is measured, not described.
124 plant records logged within about eight kilometres.
Sebangau
Central Kalimantan, Indonesia
Tropical peat swamp forest, where the carbon is metres deep and the fires that release it burn underground.
The ground under
Sebangau, Central Kalimantan
-2.3167, 113.9000 · keep going ↓
5 cmTopsoil
176.7g/kg
grams of organic carbon per kilogram of soil
The living layer: dead leaves, roots, bacteria, and the fungal threads that bind them into crumbs. Almost everything that happens to soil carbon happens here first.
30 cmThe stock
55t/haModerate
tonnes of organic carbon per hectare, top 30 cm
The ordinary range for productive farmland and managed gardens in temperate Europe.
ISRIC — World Soil Information
Modelled at 250-metre resolution from global soil surveys, and read from SoilGrids on 2026-09-01. SoilGrids publishes in versioned releases rather than continuously, so this figure is the current one until they publish again.
deeperThe network
6 fungal records near here
Each one is a specimen somebody found and wrote down. The species below are only the ones that fruit visibly; the threads that do the work almost never appear above ground at all.
- Favolaschia manipularis (Berk.) Teng2026
- Flammulaster erinaceellus (Peck) Watling2026
- Fistulinella nana (Massee) E.Horak2026
- Elmerina sclerodontia (Mont. & Berk.) Miettinen & Spirin2026
- Xylaria fockei (Miq.) Cooke2015
GBIF — Global Biodiversity Information Facility
Each name links to the original record, with its collector, date and dataset.
Reading this figure
The figure above is carbon stock over the top thirty centimetres, and that is the wrong depth for peat. Peat here runs metres deep, so a reading taken from the first thirty centimetres of it captures a small fraction of what is actually stored and reports a peatland as though it were ordinary soil. Read it as a floor, not a total: the comparison it supports is with the other places on this site measured the same way, not with what is underneath this one.
Why this ground
Ground made of carbon
Peat is plant matter that never finished rotting, because water kept the air out. It is the densest carbon store on land, and it only holds while it stays wet.
Tropical peat forms the same way as northern bog — waterlogging stops decay — but under rainforest, and it can run more than ten metres deep. Southeast Asian peatlands hold a large share of the world's tropical soil carbon in a small share of its land.
Drainage canals cut for logging and plantations lower the water table, and dried peat is fuel. Peat fires burn below the surface, are almost impossible to extinguish, and produce the haze that periodically closes airports across the region.
Sebangau is a national park and one of the places where canal-blocking and rewetting are being done at scale. It is worth looking up alongside the Flow Country: two peatlands on opposite sides of the planet, damaged the same way, being repaired with the same idea.
Read this against
Or measure somewhere else