Open soil & biodiversity data
Underneath every field is a network older than roots.
Most plants on land trade with fungi. The plant sends down sugar it made from sunlight; threads finer than a hair send back phosphorus, nitrogen and water from soil the roots can never reach. Those threads join plant to plant, and much of the carbon that ends up locked in the ground travels through them.
Why this number
Soil holds more carbon than every plant and the whole atmosphere combined.
A great deal of it is there because fungi put it there. They make glomalin, a sticky protein that binds soil into crumbs, and carbon locked inside those crumbs stays out of the air for decades rather than seasons.
Ploughing tears the network apart. Carbon that took a century to accumulate can be released in a few seasons of tillage — which is why the same field, farmed two ways, shows up as two very different numbers on this page.
Look up the field you know, then look up one you do not.
Sources
4
open datasets, called live
Resolution
250 m
of modelled soil, worldwide
Cost
Free
non-commercial, no accounts