Severity of topsoil compaction controls the impact of skid trails on soil ecological processes

Skid trails are a major management-induced disturbance in temperate forest ecosystems with considerable impact on soil ecological processes that are so far poorly understood. In German forests, skid trails comprise 10 – 20 % of the forest area that is potentially affected by soil compaction through heavy machinery. We systematically investigated the influence of skid trails on physical, chemical, and microbiological soil parameters at 84 paired plots across four Central European forest types. In low mountain forests with steeper topography, skid trails had more drastic effects than in lowland forests. Skid trails in low mountain areas showed a decrease in the C to N ratio of microbial biomass (MBC/MBN), as well as increased microbial (MBC/SOC) and enzyme activities leading to faster carbon turnover (lower C/N, EOC/EN) and increased CO2 losses (CO2/SOC) from the soil. The overall effects of the skid trails in lowland forests were small. On base-poor soils, we found an increase in the MBC..., The data was collected as part of the BiCO2 project, a large-scale study of biodiversity and carbon storage along a forestry intensity gradient at four different forest sites in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. This partial dataset was used to investigate the effects of skid trails on soil ecological parameters for the manuscript ‘Severity of topsoil compaction controls the impact of skid trails on soil ecological processes’ by Klein-Raufhake et al 2024.
For Details, see the Method section of the related paper, published in Journal of Applied Ecology. , , # Severity of topsoil compaction controls the impact of skid trails on soil ecological processes

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3ffbg79s4](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.3ffbg79s4)

We investigated the soil-ecological differences between skid trails and undisturbed control plots in terms of physical, chemical and soil microbiological parameters with a special focus on nutrient turnover processes.

## Description of the data and file structure

The data set consists of metadata on the 84 paired plots (skid trails and control) and the soil ecology parameters of the soil samples from 0-5 cm mineral soil depth measured in the laboratory. All variables occurring in the data set 'skidtrails_mastertab.xlsx' are explained in the table ‘skidtrail_metadata.xlsx’ and listed with units and scale.