Soil environment status dataset of China

Soil environment is an essential part of the earth’s environment. Current attention on soil environment problems is focused on the soil pollution. In China, most of polluted soils come from inorganic contaminants. Since 1988, Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (CERN) carried out a long-term located monitoring on soil iron, manganese, copper, zinc, boron, molybdenum, cadmium, chromium, lead, nickel, mercury, arsenic and selenium contents by CERN soil monitor specifications in the main agriculture, forest, grassland, desert and wetland ecosystems of China. Based on the surface soil environment status data monitored from the long-term observation fields of CERN, we obtained the soil environment status dataset of China. The dataset includes 13 soil environmental indicators with 97.7～105.7% accuracy and 3.36～13.15% precision in average. All the soil environmental data have complete background information and show consistency in space and time scales. The dataset is expected to provide data support for national and regional soil environment quality assessment, soil contamination risk assessment and environmental soil science research.