Dataset of Soil Erosion-Deposition Traced by Rare Earth Elements and Soil Quality Evaluation Under Different Ridge Tillage on Sloping Farmland of Thick Mollisol Region

Three bare fallow ridge tillage treatments were arranged, including no-ridge, narrow downslope ridge and wide downslope ridge treatments. The point-hole labeling method with 12 rare earth oxides was applied to trace hillslope soil erosion and sedimentation processes.

Inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) was used to measure rare earth element concentrations across the entire slope, and a mass balance model was adopted to calculate hillslope erosion and deposition rates. Topsoil samples from the 0–20 cm plough layer were collected simultaneously to determine soil physical, chemical and extracellular enzyme indicators. Principal component analysis was performed to screen the minimum data set and calculate the soil quality index (SQI).The dataset consists of three categories of raw data: ① Measured rare earth element concentrations, erosion-deposition rates and soil erosion intensity classification data for each slope segment along the whole hillslope; ② Raw measured values of 15 soil physicochemical and enzyme activity indicators; ③ Weight coefficients of the minimum data set for soil quality and spatial calculation results of SQI.Supporting documentation is provided, including experimental design, sampling locations, instrumental measurement protocols and statistical analysis code explanations.