ABSTRACT
Soil incubation is a widely used technique in studying soil organic carbon cycling. Integrating soil incubation data with soil carbon models can potentially reveal mechanisms of soil carbon dynamics underlying observations. This chapter aims to illustrate how data assimilation is applied to analyze data from soil incubation experiments using soil carbon models. After a brief introduction to soil incubation experiments and soil carbon models, a three-pool model is used to illustrate the seven-step procedure of data assimilation for the analysis of soil incubation data. Two critical aspects, different cases in the optimization step, and the dependence of parameter acceptance rate on cost function are described with detailed examples.
