1 Introduction Soil organic matter provides a myriad of ecosystem services (Smith et al. 2015), yet it has been severely degraded by anthropogenic land use, resulting in large organic carbon (C) losses in much of the world (Sanderman et al. 2017). Targeted management strategies that maintain or enhance soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks are paramount to restoring these ecosystem services, with increasing interest across a broad range of stakeholders (Derrien et al. 2023).