Soil structure and earthworms show partial recovery in 18 year old forest skid trails

The data in this repository was collected at an experimental field site, Steinplattl (48°07’24.93“N 16°02’51.68“E, 530 AMSL). It accompanies the recently submitted paper “A long road to soil health restoration: earthworms and soil structure show partial recovery in 18 year old forest skid trails” by the same authors as listed above. EW_report.csv A csv file containing data on earthworms. The column names of this table are the sampling ID, earthworm species, age of the earthworm (we distinguished between juvenile and adult), the year in which the skid track was trafficked (04 stands for the winter 2004/05 and 23 for the winter 2022/23), in each of the sampled skid tracks 3 samples were taken. This is encoded in the repetition column. The column treat specifies the treatment: H18 was trafficked 18 years before sampling, C18 is the corresponding control, H01 was trafficked 1 year before sampling C01 is the corresponding control. strack is the number of the skid track that was sampled. fun_group shows the functional group the earthworms were assigned to, total_count_m2 indicates the earthworm count n/m², total_mass_m2 the biomass of earthworms g/m² both corrected for plot size; total_count_plot and total_mass_plot indicate the number/mass of earthworms encountered on the respective plot. pH_H20 is the pH value measured in water in the upper 20 cm at the sampling point and pair indicates which trafficked plot (H) corresponds to which control plot (C). ewid_report.csv This csv file shows the pH for each sampling location (ID) of the earthworm sampling and is a summary of EW_report.csv. Hence, variables reported in this file have the same meaning as in the file above. texture.csv This file contains information on the measured texture. The columns show the sample number* (nr) of the soil core, sand, silt and clay content in percent, the sampling depth with 1 encoding a depth of 2.5-7.5 cm and 2 12.5-17.5 cm and the treatment (treat) which is the same as in EW_report.csv * Note: ID (earthworms) and nr (soil cores) do not encode the exact same samples, as the sampling design was adapted specifically for earthworm sampling and undisturbed soil core sampling. XRT_report.csv The first column nr specifies the sampling number. The column treat specifies the treatment (same as above). strack is the number of the skid track that was sampled. depth denotes the sampling depth (same as for texture.csv), rep is the repetition, i.e., which of the tree cylinders taken from one soil pit. pair indicates which trafficked plot (H) corresponds to which control plot (C). pit indicates from which soil pit and depth the cylinders were sampled (e.g. H0411 would be soil pit H041 at 2.5-7.5 cm and H0412 would be the same soil pit at 12.5-17.5 cm). The following measured parameters are included in this file: Parameter Meaning Unit z_aniso_rock The anisotropy of rock fragments with a focus on horizontal structures [-] z_anisopo The anisotropy of pore space with a focus on horizontal structures [-] biopor_prz Image derived biopores % gamma_p Gamma connectivity of pores [-] percvol_pore Percolating volume of pores. mm³/mm³ pore_prz Imaged porosity % bd Fine earth (<2mm) bulk density g/cm³ C_prz Soil organic carbon % CN C/N ratio [-]