March 11, 2025 – Boulder, CO – Today, Perennial, a leading measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) company, launched Soil Ecosystem Maps — an interactive tool that showcases the company's critical soil health and soil organic carbon datasets.
Supporting global food security and regenerative agriculture initiatives requires scalable data spanning the entire soil ecosystem, including physical, biological, and chemical conditions. Soil Ecosystem Maps helps fill this gap, enabling stakeholders worldwide to explore soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestration potential, SOC measurements, and novel microbial health indicators like Carbon Use Efficiency and Microbial Soil Temperature Index.
Advancements in Soil Carbon and Health Measurement
Soil Ecosystem Maps stands apart from existing datasets by delivering SOC measurements with improved accuracy and resolution, integrating microbial evolution and biogeochemistry into its SOC sequestration potential modeling, and introducing newly developed indices that enhance understanding of soil carbon storage and activity of the soil microbiome.
Key innovations include:
- SOC Sequestration Potential (SOCSPOT) – The first global dataset providing long-term (30-year) relative SOC sequestration rate potential at 30m resolution globally (visualized on the map at 500m). SOCSPOT was developed using a novel hybrid modeling approach based on microbial-community adaptation to historical climate and SOC conditions.
- Microbial Soil Health Indicators – Four innovative datasets quantifying key microbial functions influencing soil carbon dynamics:
- Carbon Use Efficiency – The first global dataset capturing both spatial and temporal microbial carbon assimilation.
- Microbial Soil Temperature Index – A new metric adapted from agronomic growing degree days (GDD) to quantify microbial activity potential.
- Microbial pH Index – The first high-resolution measure of microbial adaptation to soil pH variations.
- Microbial Moisture Response Index – An application of microbial community adaptation research to quantify sequestration potential based on historical and contemporary soil moisture patterns.
- ATLAS-SOC Core – A high-resolution dataset enabling large-scale SOC stock baseline measurements without field sampling. ATLAS-SOC (Advanced Terrestrial Machine-Learning Analysis System for Soil Organic Carbon) leverages over 350,000 soil samples, machine learning, and microbial- and biophysically-informed predictors to deliver up to 90% project-level and 80% field-level accuracy.
*For organizations that require Tier 3 measurements or registry compliance, adding minimal soil sampling to Perennial’s ATLAS-SOC Fine-Tuned model can provide verified SOC measurements with 95%+ accuracy and less than 5% uncertainty
How the Soil Ecosystem Data Supports Key Industries
The datasets visualized on Soil Ecosystem Maps provide critical insights for:
- Sustainability & Supply Chain Reporting – ATLAS-SOC Core enables sustainability teams at food, fiber, and beverage companies to achieve large-scale, year-over-year inventory measurements across crops and geographies, without soil sampling or farmer data. Combined with SOCSPOT and the various soil health indices, teams are equipped to guide specific regenerative practices to optimize performance and impact.
- Carbon Market Project Development – SOCSPOT enables project developers to identify high-potential land for carbon sequestration and optimize stratification strategies. ATLAS-SOC Core facilitates pre-sampling analysis, low-cost baseline impact estimation, and improved stratification.
- Land Investment & Conservation Planning – Perennial’s datasets provide data-driven insights into soil productivity, long-term carbon storage potential, and land at risk of degradation. Microbial soil health indicators empower decision-makers to assess soil resilience and potential response to management, guiding land acquisitions and conservation initiatives with greater confidence.
"Agriculture is a global effort, and it requires truly global data to support it,” said David Schurman, Perennial co-founder and CPO. “We knew we needed to put our data into the hands of people everywhere, because in order to improve soil ecosystems we have to be able to measure them. Soil Ecosystem Maps allows farmers and ranchers, project developers, land managers, sustainability leads, and conservation organizations to see what’s possible.”
Soil Ecosystem Maps is now available for exploration at data.perennial.earth.
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About Perennial:
Perennial is a full-service MRV (measurement, reporting, and verification) company that delivers compliance-ready, outcome-based measurements for any crop and any program—anywhere in the world. Its advanced digital soil mapping technology drastically reduces sampling needs and eliminates geographical limitations, making it the most cost-effective, streamlined, and scalable way to measure, report, and verify emissions reductions, carbon removal, and sustainable outcomes. Based in Boulder, Colorado USA, Perennial has raised over $25M USD to advance its mission of increasing regenerative agriculture adoption and outcomes on 100M acres globally. Perennial is backed by leaders in climate tech, agriculture, and carbon markets and its industry-leading technology has been recognized by TIME, Forbes, NASA, and Fast Company.
For media inquiries or interview requests, contact: Heidi Sloane, hsloane@perennial.earth
