Do you have carbon data from marine sediments in European regional seas? Then you have the opportunity to contribute to the Euro-Carbon Database.

Marine sediments are one of the major organic carbon (C) reservoirs on the planet and they are important in regulating earth’s climate. To better quantify sediment organic C stocks on a European sea scale and better inform management of the seafloor, we invite the whole research community to contribute data to create a comprehensive database of sediment carbon stocks.

The objective of the database is to compile sediment organic carbon data to provide a baseline of sediment organic carbon levels on a European regional sea scale. The database can potentially be updated periodically in the future to determine trends in organic carbon pools.

A data paper describing the database will be submitted to the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters and all data contributors (originators of data) will be named co-authors on this manuscript (see information below).

Therefore, if you have any marine sediment carbon observations (i.e. field data) from nearshore to the deep ocean in European regional seas you would like to include in the database, please either:

• Use the below excel spreadsheet and return it to us with your data. We prefer to receive these as Excel or text files, but we can deal with most other file types if necessary. Spreadsheets of data should be row-wise (i.e. each data point on its own row).
• Let us know of any possible open data repository for sediment organic carbon observations, which we can access ourselves.

Please send this information to Anna Elizabeth Løvgren Graversen: au513721@ecos.au.dk

Please note: For blue carbon in seagrass sediments, we already have access to the seagrass carbon stock database collated by Hilary Kennedy et al. 2022 (https://repository.kaust.edu.sa/handle/10754/686872) and Ariane Arias-Ortiz et al. are collating a database on seagrass sediment C-sequestration rates from cores with Pb210 data until 2020, which will be accessible later this year. Here, we want to collate new data not already included in this effort. In case of doubts, do let us know.

The following data is ESSENTIAL for inclusion into the EURO-CARBON database:

• Your name and email address
• Time stamp (day/month/year)
• Georeference (latitude and longitude)
• Sediment depth range measured
• Sediment carbon (% or g C/cm3)

In addition, where available, we would like to include other information such as:

• Bottom depth
• Habitat category
• Salinity
• Temperature
• Sediment porosity
• Carbon accumulation rate

A full list of potential data entries is in the donwloadable excel file “Blue carbon data  template”.

In the excel file you will find 3 different tabs:

• Explanation – the different variables are explained in this sheet.
• Sediment data – data entry sheet associated with the sediment data. The variables marked with green are mandatory and thereby the ones we need to collect. The yellow ones are optional, but if you have these data, we would appreciate to get these as well.
• Biomass data – data entry associated with biomass data. The sheet is colored yellow because all variables are optional.

Our idea is to make the entire dataset available through an open-source database. A data article describing the database will be submitted to the journal Limnology and oceanography Letters (Impact Factor = 8.5). All originators of submitted data and those that provide more than 40 individual carbon observations will be named co-authors on the resulting data article. 

Please contact us if you have questions or suggestions.

Please also note that we would like to receive the data at the latest on the 15^th of August 2023. Also please feel free to share this with colleagues who might be interested.

We highly appreciate your effort to make this database a reality!