What is SOCKG?
The Soil Organic Carbon Knowledge Graph (SOCKG) enhances robust soil carbon modeling, which is crucial for voluntary carbon markets. These markets create incentives for climate-friendly practices by encouraging the retention of carbon in soil, reducing atmospheric carbon levels. Industry sectors, like energy and transportation, purchase carbon credits to offset unavoidable emissions, while farmers and land managers are rewarded for adopting practices that increase soil organic carbon (SOC). For these markets to function effectively, it is essential to have advanced soil carbon modeling technologies that accurately measure SOC content, predict changes, and link those changes to specific agricultural practices. High-quality data is central to this process. By integrating siloed data into a cohesive knowledge graph, linking it to broader datasets, and establishing infrastructure for its sustainability, SOCKG can play a transformative role in enabling and accelerating the growth of this emerging market.

What’s inside SOCKG: The subplot
Treatments are applied here, observations are recorded here.
A treatment is the standing condition assigned to the subplot. An event is a dated thing that happened on it. They’re separate.
What’s inside SOCKG: Three sample types
Soil from one depth range, read three ways.
Physical
Chemical
Biological
One sample, up to three records
AgCROS doesn’t record whether the three measurements came from the same soil — so the graph keeps them separate.
Share of all samples
133,953 total.
What’s inside SOCKG: The dataset
Agricultural Collaborative Research Outcomes System — USDA.
How a field is divided
Each field splits into blocks, blocks into plots, plots into subplots. On the map, a field is what the dashboard calls a plot.
Who uses it?
SOCKG provides policymakers, land administrators, environmental NGOs, advocacy groups, educators, and real estate professionals with accurate data and insights on soil carbon stocks, fluxes, and dynamics. This empowers them to make informed decisions in climate change mitigation, policy development, land use planning, educational programs, and real estate projects. By integrating and standardizing diverse data sources, SOCKG enables large-scale research and the development of more effective carbon sequestration strategies. Leveraging advanced querying techniques and machine learning models, SOCKG offers substantial support to soil carbon researchers, helping them predict soil carbon stocks and reduce uncertainties in studies related to soil organic carbon.
Some tools we develop for SOCKG
- SOCKG DashboardExplore experiment plots on the map and pivot the datacube
- OntoDocWIDOCO ontology docs for 19 graphs, with descriptions from OntoDoc
- OntoProfilerProfiles a knowledge graph's schema from the endpoint alone
- GraphDBSOCKG itself, hosted on GraphDB
- Data DownloadsData dumps of the graph, on Google Drive
- OKNThe NSF programme SOCKG is part of