Multi-year hourly time series of soil-atmosphere CO₂ exchange and environmental variables across biological soil crust and plant microsites in the Tabernas Desert (2017–2022)

This dataset contains hourly time series measurements collected from December 19, 2017 to March 29, 2022 in the Tabernas Desert, including soil–atmosphere CO₂ fluxes, soil and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, soil and air temperature, soil water content, and atmospheric pressure. Measurements were conducted across microsites dominated by biological soil crusts and vascular plants, with replicated observations within each microsite type. The dataset provides high-frequency observations of carbon exchange and associated environmental variables to support studies on soil respiration, dryland carbon cycling, biocrust and plant ecology, and environmental controls on soil–atmosphere gas exchange. Data are provided as hourly records with associated metadata describing variables, units, instrumentation, microsite type, and replication structure. Subsets of this dataset (~first two years of observations) contributed to analyses previously published in Lopez-Canfin et al. (2022 a, b), and Kim et al. (2024). The present release provides the extended full time series (2017–2022) associated to the full experimental design.