Revegetation rewilds the soil bacterial microbiome of an old field- Part 2: soil chemistry 

The dataset provides information on soil chemistry from a 10 year chronosequence sample of restoration in southern Australia. The parameters include: A) Physical properties- Soil moisture (%), Gravel (%) - ( >2.0 mm), Soil Texture, i.e.Course Sand (%) (200-2000 µm), Fine Sand (%) - (20-200 µm), Sand (%), Silt (%) (2-20 µm), Clay (%) (<2 µm), and B) Chemical properties- such as, Ammonium Nitrogen (mg/Kg), Nitrate Nitrogen (mg/Kg), Phosphorus Colwell (mg/Kg), Potassium Colwell (mg/Kg), Sulphur (mg/Kg), Organic Carbon (%), Conductivity (dS/m), pH (CaCl2), pH (H2O), DTPA Copper (mg/Kg), DTPA Iron (mg/Kg), DTPA Manganese (mg/Kg), DTPA Zinc (mg/Kg), Exc. Aluminium (meq/100g), Exc. Calcium (meq/100g), Exc. Magnesium (meq/100g), Exc. Potassium (meq/100g), Exc. Sodium (meq/100g) and Boron Hot CaCl2 (mg/Kg). This data would have application for land managers. The soil chemistry data is also related to the eDNA OTU table published on "https://doi.org/10.4227/05/5878480a91885", titled "Revegetation rewilds the soil bacterial microbiome of an old field. Part 1: OTU raw data matrix", and as such it would have an appeal to researchers undertaking a meta-analysis on eDNA and restoration outcomes. 

We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging. The authors thank A. Bissett, A. Fitzgerald, A. Young, Z. Baruch, S. Caddy-Retalic, L. Clarke, S. Kennedy, I. Fox, M. Laws, K. McCallum, and J. McDonald for technical and field assistance. We are grateful for technical, field and site access support from the Australian Genome Research Facility, BioPlatforms Australia, SA Water and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. This work was supported by Australian Research Council funding to AJL and MFB (DE150100542; DP150103414). 

This project forms a part of the lead author's PhD project. The information on soil chemistry data was generated for a manuscript published on the Molecular Ecology journal "Revegetation rewilds the soil bacterial microbiome of an old field" that uses eDNA assessment. It provides contextual soil chemistry data in support of the metabarcoding work. 

Soil Collection: Three 25 m x 25 m quadrats were randomly selected per site, giving a total of 24 quadrats across the 8 sites. Soil was sampled from the 0-10 cm and 20-30 cm soil horizons at each quadrat. Nine soil samples were pooled into a sterile plastic bag, and homogenised using a sterilised trowel. 300 g soil was sampled from these pooled samples and outsourced or soil physical and chemical analysis.