Total and exchangeable soil elemental chemistry across contrasting past land uses in a mountain forest watershed (Rouge-Rupt watershed, Vosges, North East of France)

This dataset contains soil chemical measurements including:
(1) total elemental contents determined by XRF,
(2) exchangeable element contents measured using the hexaamminecobalt method,
(3) standard pedological parameters (pH, electrical conductivity, total C, total N, C/N ratio and S/T), and
(4) exchangeable phosphorus quantified using the Duchaufour and Bonneau (1959) extraction method.
The dataset was produced as part of JBC’s PhD research and supports the study entitled “A watershed-scale combined historical, socio-ecosystem and open-access remote sensing approach to minimize past land-use human chemical legacy biases in mountain forest soil site selection: from detection to avoidance”, submitted for publication in December 2025.
The associated research investigates how past agricultural and military land uses have shaped present-day forest soil chemical properties at the watershed scale, and evaluates how combining historical archives, open-access remote sensing data and soil geochemistry can help identify and avoid long-term chemical legacies during site selection for forest and soil ecology studies. (please note that 2 CSV files are provide coresponding respectively to the Metadata and the Data)