Soil and Sediment Carbon Concentration Measurements for Method Comparison

A dataset supporting a 2026 manuscript comparing Loss on Ignition and Elemental Analysis methods for quantifying organic and inorganic carbon. It includes measurements from certified reference materials and real-world agricultural soil and intertidal sediment samples from England. The data was authored by Robert Pemberton and shared under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Comparing the accuracy and precision of Loss on Ignition versus Elemental Analysis for total carbon quantification based on the described method tests.
• Evaluating pre-treatment techniques (combustion vs. acid decarbonation) for differentiating organic and inorganic carbon fractions as detailed in the study.
• Calibrating mass loss measurements from Loss on Ignition to organic and inorganic carbon content using the findings on calibration requirements.
• Assessing the variability of carbon measurement protocols on homogenized soil samples based on the reported relative standard deviations.

Strengths

• Includes measurements from certified reference materials (CRMs), which provide a benchmark for accuracy.
• Compares three common protocols using both controlled materials and real-world samples (agricultural soil and intertidal sediments).
• Reports precise results for some methods, with relative standard deviations <3% for combustion-EA and LoI on a homogenized soil sample.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• The dataset is small (60.1 KB), indicating a limited scope focused on methodological comparison rather than extensive environmental sampling.

Provenance

Source

Robert Pemberton, associated with the manuscript by Sparkes et al.

Collection Method

Data generated from laboratory experiments comparing Loss on Ignition and Elemental Analysis with different pre-treatments.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-28 17:54:38; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Includes saltmarsh sediment samples from around England.