Nitrogen cycling functional gene abundance and potential activity in novel perennial forage cropping systems in Rwanda

This data is associated with a study entitled "Nitrogen cycling functional gene abundance and potential activity in novel perennial forage cropping systems in Rwanda", in which we sampled bulk soil from two locations in Rwanda cross a dry to rainy season transition. We evaluated the degree to which legume intercropping affected soil nitrogen status and putative biological nitrification inhibition in the companion intercrop species.

There are two data sets associated with this study:

1. The file entitle "soil_data.csv" contains all measurements related to bulk soil samples (n=335). We measured nitrification potential (NP), denitrification enzyme activity (log_dea) that was log-transformed for analysis, permanganate-oxidizable carbon (mg_kg_POXC), nitrate (mg_kg_NO3N), ammonium (mg_kg_NH4N), potentially mineralizable nitrogen (net_NH4N), pH, gravimetric water content (gwc), total extractable nitrogen (TN), and non-purgeable organic carbon (NPOC). In addition, this file contains metadata such as sampling location, plant treatment, block, and collection timepoint.

2. The file entitle "NiCE_data.csv " contains data from a high-throughput qPCR experiment in which we quantified twenty nitrogen cycle functional soil from the bulk soil samples from the previous dataset. This file contains: a qPCR assay number, the assay target gene, forward and reverse primers, soil ID number, gene concentration, Ct value, and the log10-transformed gene copy number.