Global hotspots for soil nature conservation - survey dataset + supporting code

We used composite topsoil samples from global field surveys which were conducted between 2016-2019 following standardized field protocols. This global field survey includes 151 locations from all continents and 23 countries, from which 615 composite topsoil samples were collected, providing a large representation of all climatic and vegetation biomes in the planet (Supplementary Fig. 1). Between three and five composite soil (top ~0-10cm) samples (from 5-10 soil cores) were collected in these locations (ranging between 0.09-0.25 ha) following the protocol described in Maestre et al. (2012). Environmental predictors were collected from publicly available datasets. Elevation and climatic information for each location was obtained from WorldClim v2 (1 km2 resolution; https://www.worldclim.org/data/bioclim.html), including information on climatologies and on the seasonality of temperature and precipitation. Soil pH was determined with a soil pH-meter from a soil-water mix 71. Texture was determined as in Maestre et al. 71 and, in the case of missing information, this was filled using Soilgrid v2 (https://soilgrids.org; as in 16). Information on dominant vegetation (forest, shrublands or grasslands) was obtained as part of the field survey.