A dataset of soil nutrients from long-term fertilization experiments in subtropical paddy fields in 2024

Soil nutrients are of great importance for ensuring high and sustainable crop yields, which directly determine the fertility capacity and ecological function of agricultural soils. The dynamic monitoring of soil nutrients could help to reveal the evolution trends of soil fertility under long-term fertilization managements. This dataset is based on 12 long-term fertilization experiments located in Hunan Province initiated between 1986 and 2011. Fertilization treatments contains no fertilizer (CK), conventional chemical fertilizer (CF), nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer (NP), nitrogen-potassium fertilizer (NK), nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer (NPK), high contents of nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer (hNPK), 30% organic fertilizer replaces chemical fertilizer N (30% OM), 40% organic fertilizer replaces chemical fertilizer N (40% OM), 50% organic fertilizer replaces chemical fertilizer N (50% OM), 60% organic fertilizer replaces chemical fertilizer N (60% OM), 100% organic fertilizer (OM), and rice straw combined with NPK fertilizer (NPKS). After the late rice harvest in 2024, soil samples from top layer of 0-20 cm were collected and soil nutrients were analyzed according to standard methods to obtain the dataset of soil nutrients, including soil organic carbon, total nitrogen, total phosphorus, total potassium, nitrate nitrogen, ammonium nitrogen, alkali-hydrolysable nitrogen, available phosphorus, available potassium, and soil pH.

The dataset comprises 5parts of basic information on experiment plots, initial soil basic physicochemical properties, fertilizer application amounts of plots, analytical methods of soil samples, and soil nutrient contents. This dataset could provide not only the data support for soil nutrient cycling processes and succession trends in subtropical paddy soils, but also the basic information for the fertilizer application and optimized management of regional paddy fields.