Background and Aim <p>Soil carbon sequestration, including organic (SOC) and inorganic (SIC), plays a pivotal role in mitigating climate change. However, for agroforestry systems in drylands, how SOC and SIC respond to edaphic factors under different management practices remains unclear.</p> Methods <p>We collected 480 soil samples from 30 paired shelterbelt–cropland sites in the middle Heihe River Basin, Northwest China. At each site, samples were taken from four positions, with each position being sampled at four depths within the top 1&#xa0;m. We measured SOC and SIC contents, as well as relevant soil physicochemical properties and nutrients. Subsequently, we determined the drivers of SOC and SIC using correlation analyses, variance partitioning, linear mixed-effects models, and structural equation modeling.</p> Results <p>No differences were found in SOC, SIC, and the SIC:SOC ratio between shelterbelts and croplands. A key difference was that SOC exhibited a clear depth-dependent, i.e. it declined with increasing depth, whereas SIC remained relatively stable. Multiple methods converged to show that SOC was primarily determined by soil nutrients, whereas SIC was mainly driven by physicochemical properties. Variance partitioning further revealed that edaphic factors explained 78.2% and 70.1% of the variation in SOC, and 45.1% and 49.7% of the variation in SIC, in shelterbelts and croplands, respectively.</p> Conclusion <p>While SOC and SIC responded differently to edaphic conditions within land-use types, their dominant abiotic controls converged between shelterbelts and croplands. This underscores the critical importance of nutrient management and ionic balance regulation for optimizing soil carbon stabilization in dryland agroforestry systems.</p>