Dataset of Soil Erosion and Degradation in Black Soil Cropland of Northeast China

Based on the physical and chemical properties of soil samples collected during two periods of soil survey, the soil species survey in the 1980s and the soil series survey in the 2010s, a comprehensive soil quality index was constructed in this paper via principal component analysis, considering soil thickness, soil organic matter content, total nitrogen content, total phosphorus content, total potassium content, pH value, and bulk density.

The spatial distribution maps of soil properties in the 1980s and 2010s were created with a 90 m resolution using environmental covariates and the random forest model. Fuzzy membership functions were built to evaluate soil quality, and soil degradation was the difference between the quality from these two periods. A total of 15 erosion-degradation types of black soil were classified based on two aspects: the intensity of soil erosion types and the degree of soil quality degradation.