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Soil biological and chemical properties in grassland-woodland transitions in Scotland, 2024

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This dataset is available under the terms of the Open Government Licence

The dataset contains measurements of several soil properties comprising microbial biomass carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), soil enzyme activities, microbial biomass, C and N concentrations, soil carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes and soil microbial and faunal community composition (using DNA based approaches). The data, collected during 2024, originate from three sites (Limerigg, Alyth, and Peebles) comprising a grassland and adjacent former grasslands converted to Scots pine forest; each sites contains 1 grassland and 2 forests, the latter representing two age classes (approximately 14 and 25 years old). Data were collected for a project to understand the critical role of soil food webs in driving ecosystem processes in response to woodland expansion.

Publication date: 2026-09-29

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Comma-separated values (CSV)

Spatial information

Study area

Spatial representation type

Tabular (text)

Spatial reference system

GB place names

Temporal information

Temporal extent

2024-06-01 to 2024-10-31

Provenance & quality

In total, we collected 135 cores across the season (five cores x three site clusters (Limerigg, Alyth, and Peebles) x three site types (grassland, young plantation, and mature plantation)). Once collected, cores were placed in chilled coolers and were then transported to the University of Manchester, where they were kept at 4 degrees C until further processed. We made several measurements on cores, relating to the physical and chemical structure to parameterize soil properties, prior to DNA extraction and sequencing.

250 mg subsamples were used for DNA extraction with the DNeasy PowerSoil Pro Kit following the manufacturer's instructions. Two sets of primers were used to target both bacteria and fungi.

Prior to analyses, amplicon sequence variant (ASV) tables were rarefied 100 times (using the rrarefy function from the package 'vegan') and subsequently averaged to account for differences in sampling depth between samples. We rarefied community matrices for the dissimilarity matrices alongside ASV richness and Shannon's diversity separately. In addition, we rarefied the dataset to calculate then visualize the average proportional abundances of major phyla (for bacteria and archaea, fungi), class (soil fauna), genera (for arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi), and the fungal guilds (ectomycorrhizal, pathogen, and saprotrophic) between our three sites.

We measured water holding capacity and soil microbial biomass using chloroform fumigation extraction.
Soil was oven dried (105 degrees C) and then ball-milled (Retsch Ball Mill MM 400, Haan, Germany) where we analysed for C and N on all soil cores collected. We then determined %C, %N and C:N ratio on 10 mg of soil with a Elementar Vario EL element analyser. We calculated loss on ignition (LOI, %) to measure the organic content of each soil type.

CO2 fluxes were measured in the field using an EGM5 portable soil respiration system.
All datasets were compiled in excel and visualised in R to check for outliers and unusual observations.