Urban Soil Quality Assessment—A Comprehensive Case Study Dataset of Urban Garden Soils

摘要

Soil is the foundation of ecosystem functioning in urban green spaces and provides key ecosystemservices for a livable city (Zhu et al., 2018). Urban soils are a mixture of natural soil-formingfactors and anthropogenic activities (Shuster and Dadio, 2018). Therefore, they require an adaptedset of indicators for a soil quality assessment. Soil quality is one of the three constituents ofenvironmental quality, along with water and air quality (Andrews et al., 2002). It is generallyreferred to as the capacity of a soil to function within ecosystems and land-use boundaries tosustain biological productivity, maintain environmental quality, and promote plant and animalhealth, including human health (Doran and Parkin, 1994). Here, we present a comprehensivedataset of 37 soil quality indicators measured at 170 plots in 85 urban gardens within the city ofZurich, Switzerland. They represent allmajor inherent and dynamic soil properties for a soil qualityassessment (Bünemann et al., 2018), including eight physical, nine chemical and eleven biologicalsoil quality indicators, plus nine soil metal properties (As, Ba, Co, Cu, Ni, Pb, Sb, V, Zn). Soilfunction decomposition was assessed by the tea bag index method (Keuskamp et al., 2013). Resultsregarding the influence of garden management, local and landscape effects on the distribution ofsoil quality indicators can be found in Tresch et al. (2018). This dataset is useful for future studieson urban soil quality, ecosystem services or for modeling purposes such as carbon dynamics orgreenhouse gas inventory models in cities.