Soil organic carbon (SOC) information is fundamental for improving global carbon cycle modeling efforts, but discrepancies exist from country‐to‐global scales. We predicted the spatial distribution of SOC stocks (topsoil; 0–30 cm) and quantified modeling uncertainty across Mexico and the conterminous United States (CONUS). We used a multisource SOC dataset (>10 000 pedons, between 1991 and 2010) coupled with a simulated annealing regression framework that accounts for variable selection. Our model explained ~50% of SOC spatial variability (across 250‐m grids). We analyzed model variance, and the residual variance of six conventional pedotransfer functions for estimating bulk density to calculate SOC stocks. Two independent datasets confirmed that the SOC stock for both countries represents between 46 and 47 Pg with a total modeling variance of ±12 Pg. We report a residual variance of 10.4 ±5.1 Pg of SOC stocks calculated from six pedotransfer functions for soil bulk density. When reducing training data to define decades with relatively higher density of observations (1991–2000 and 2001–2010, respectively), model variance for predicted SOC stocks ranged between 41 and 55 Pg. We found nearly 42% of SOC across Mexico in forests and 24% in croplands, whereas 31% was found in forests and 28% in croplands across CONUS. Grasslands and shrublands stored 29 and 35% of SOC across Mexico and CONUS, respectively. We predicted SOC stocks >30% below recent global estimates that do not account for uncertainty and are based on legacy data. Our results provide insights for interpretation of estimates based on SOC legacy data and benchmarks for improving regional‐to‐global monitoring efforts.

Soil moisture plays a key role in the Earth’s water and carbon cycles, but acquisition of continuous (i.e., gap-free) soil moisture measurements across large regions is a challenging task due to limitations of currently available point measurements. Satellites offer critical information for soil moisture over large areas on a regular basis (e.g., European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI), National Aeronautics and Space Administration Soil Moisture Active Passive (NASA SMAP)); however, there are regions where satellite-derived soil moisture cannot be estimated because of certain conditions such as high canopy density, frozen soil, or extremely dry soil. We compared and tested three approaches, ordinary kriging (OK), regression kriging (RK), and generalized linear models (GLMs), to model soil moisture and fill spatial data gaps from the ESA CCI product version 4.5 from January 2000 to September 2012, over a region of 465,777 km² across the Midwest of the USA. We tested our proposed methods to fill gaps in the original ESA CCI product and two data subsets, removing 25% and 50% of the initially available valid pixels. We found a significant correlation (r = 0.558, RMSE = 0.069 m³m⁻³) between the original satellite-derived soil moisture product with ground-truth data from the North American Soil Moisture Database (NASMD). Predicted soil moisture using OK also had significant correlation with NASMD data when using 100% (r = 0.579, RMSE = 0.067 m³m⁻³), 75% (r = 0.575, RMSE = 0.067 m³m⁻³), and 50% (r = 0.569, RMSE = 0.067 m³m⁻³) of available valid pixels for each month of the study period. RK showed comparable values to OK when using different percentages of available valid pixels, 100% (r = 0.582, RMSE = 0.067 m³m⁻³), 75% (r = 0.582, RMSE = 0.067 m³m⁻³), and 50% (r = 0.571, RMSE = 0.067 m³m⁻³). GLM had slightly lower correlation with NASMD data (average r = 0.475, RMSE = 0.070 m³m⁻³) when using the same subsets of available data (i.e., 100%, 75%, 50%). Our results provide support for using geostatistical approaches (OK and RK) as alternative techniques to gap-fill missing spatial values of satellite-derived soil moisture.

To trust findings in computational science, scientists need workflows that trace the data provenance and support results explainability. As workflows become more complex, tracing data provenance and explaining results become harder to achieve. In this paper, we propose a computational environment that automatically creates a workflow execution's record trail and invisibly attaches it to the workflow's output, enabling data traceability and results explainability. Our solution transforms existing container technology, includes tools for automatically annotating provenance metadata, and allows effective movement of data and metadata across the workflow execution. We demonstrate the capabilities of our environment with the study of SOMOSPIE, an earth science workflow. Through a suite of machine learning modeling techniques, this workflow predicts soil moisture values from the 27 km resolution satellite data down to higher resolutions necessary for policy making and precision agriculture. By running the workflow in our environment, we can identify the causes of different accuracy measurements for predicted soil moisture values in different resolutions of the input data and link different results to different machine learning methods used during the soil moisture downscaling, all without requiring scientists to know aspects of workflow design and implementation.

Soil moisture is an important parameter that regulates multiple ecosystem processes and provides important information for environmental management and policy decision-making. Spaceborne sensors provide soil moisture information over large areas, but information is commonly available at coarse resolution with spatial and temporal gaps. Here, we present a modular spatial inference framework to downscale satellite-derived soil moisture using terrain parameters and test the performance of two modeling methods (Kernel-Weighted K-Nearest Neighbor and Random Forest ). We generate monthly and weekly gap-free spatial predictions on soil moisture at 1 km using data from the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI; version 6.1) over two regions in the conterminous United States. RF was the method that performed better in cross-validation when comparing with the reference ESA-CCI data, but KKNN showed a slightly higher agreement with ground-truth information as part of independent validation. We postulate that more heterogeneous landscapes (i.e., high topographic variation) may be more challenging for downscaling and predicting soil moisture; therefore, moisture networks should increase monitoring efforts across these complex landscapes. Future opportunities for development of modular cyberinfrastructure tools for downscaling satellite-derived soil moisture are discussed.

The goal of the North American Land Change Monitoring System (NALCMS) is to provide annually updated land cover maps for the North American continent using satellite information and automated data processing. Current activities of the project aim at the development of an automated algorithm to detect areas of change using 250 m MODIS data. This paper shows the methodology developed for Mexico and demonstrates the resulting change map between the years 2005 and 2010. A data-driven algorithm that builds upon the spectral differences of monthly image composites was developed and critical parameters were defined. Results show that only extreme values of difference images indicate change and that change has to be mapped in at least 25% of all features. The total area of change detected between 2005 and 2010 was 702,331 ha (0.36% of the country) which is in line with other change detection studies in Mexico. Accuracy assessment using higher spatial resolution images accounts for the change fraction in the reference data. The overall accuracy of the change/no change mask is approximately 80%. This is similar to decision tree-based change classification that was developed in other studies and applied to Mexico and significantly better than post-classification change detection. The main limitation is the coarse spatial resolution considering the small-patch landscape structure for large portions of the country, which results in a high omission error (50%) but only 20% commission error for change.