Land use is the main driver of soil organic carbon spatial distribution in a high mountain ecosystem

Background Terrestrial ecosystems play a significant role in carbon (C) storage. Human activities, such as urbanization, infrastructure, and land use change, can reduce significantly the C stored in the soil. The aim of this research was to measure the spatial variability of soil organic C (SOC) in the national park La Malinche (NPLM) in the central highlands of Mexico as an example of highland ecosystems and to determine the impact of land use change on the SOC stocks through deterministic and geostatistical geographic information system (GIS) based methods. Methods The soil was collected from different landscapes, that is, pine, fir, oak and mixed forests, natural grassland, moor and arable land, and organic C content determined. Different GIS-based deterministic (inverse distance weighting, local polynomial interpolation and radial basis function) and geostatistical interpolation techniques (ordinary kriging, cokriging and empirical Bayes kriging) were used to map the SOC stocks and other environmental variables of the top soil layer. Results All interpolation GIS-based methods described the spatial distribution of SOC of the NPLM satisfactorily. The total SOC stock of the NPLM was 2.45 Tg C with 85.3% in the forest (1.26 Tg C in the A horizon and 0.83 Tg C in the O horizon), 11.4% in the arable soil (0.23 Tg in the A horizon and only 0.05 Tg C in the O horizon) and 3.3% in the high moor (0.07 Tg C in the A horizon and