Baselight is shutting down June 30.
Export any data that you want to keep. Read the announcement.
Department of Agriculture
Dataset Description
These data were collected from 2018-2020 on pastures managed to compare soil nutrients and microbes from pastures managed with patch-burn grazing using cow-calf pairs and patch-burn grazing pastures using sheep. Nutrients were quantified by the NDSU Soil Testing Lab and MicrobialID quanitfied the soil microbial composition using PLFA.
Data points were distributed across quarters and ecological sites from 6 total pastures (3 cow-calf, 3 sheep).
Factor and sorting variables include:
- Year
- Sample (just the sample number, not used in analysis)
- Location (abbreviated pasture identifier)
- Block (grouping of pastures)
- Treatment (Cattle or Sheep)
- Point (sampling location within a pasture, numbers restart for each pasture)
- ESD (ecological site description, our measure of inherent heterogeneity for this project)
- TSF (time since fire arranged with longer factor levels)
- tsf (time since fire arranged with shorter factor levels)
- LocPatch (combined pasture name with quarter of the pasture)
- Patch (quarter of an individual pasture)
- Month
Soils181920.csv contains monthly measures:
- nitrate (NO3_ppm)
- ammonium (NH4_ppm)
Soils181920 also contains nutrients measured once a summer:
- phosphorus (P_ppm)
- potassium (K_ppm)
- calcium (Ca_ppm)
- magnesium (Mg_ppm)
- total nitrogen (TotalN_percent)
- total carbon (TotalC_percent)
- total carbon:nitrogen ratio (TCNR)
SoilMicrobes.csv is trimmed to the nutrients from the month of July from each summer when the microbial community were also quantified. Soil nutrients are the same as above and microbial data also include:
- Total_Biomass
- AM_percent
- GNB_percent
- Euk_percent
- Fungi_percent
- GPB_percent
- Actino_percent
- AM_bio
- GNB_bio
- Euk_bio
- Fungi_bio
- GPB_bio
- Actino_bio
- FBR
- PredPrey
- GpGb
- SatUn
- MonPol
- GNegStress
LitBags1920.csv has microbial data from SoilMicrobes that were not used in analysis, but adds the Decomp column for percent of mass loss and Species for the litter in the litter bag pouch (either smooth brome BRIN or kentucky bluegrass POPR)
Organization: Department of Agriculture
Organization URL: https://catalog.data.gov/organization/usda
Last updated: 2026-05-22
Tags: Patch-burn grazing, Prescribed fire, cattle, rangelands, sheep, soil microbes, soil nutrients