Impacts of organic matter amendments on urban soil carbon and soil quality: A meta-analysis

Organic matter amendment application is an important avenue of beneficial waste diversion and is used to improve soil quality in agricultural and urban settings. In urban regions, amendments are used to support local food production, maintain vegetation for landscaping and recreational use, and reclaim disturbed soils. Urban regions generate large quantities of wasted organic resources for potential application aiding in creating a circular nutrient economy. There is a growing interest in understanding the effects of amendments such as compost, biosolids, and biochar on soil properties in agricultural settings. Gaps remain, however, in assessing their effects in urban land uses. We conducted a literature review to assess the effects of compost, biochar, and biosolids on soil carbon and soil quality of urban soils managed for gardening, landscaping, recreation, and reclamation. Application of organic matter amendments led to an average increase of 3.6 units of soil organic matter% (SOM%)..., This data was collected (up unilt July of 2023) primarily by gathering data from articles accessible via Google Scholar and Web of Science. African Journals Online and Dialnet were also searched. Almost all of the data is directly from the papers in the same form, except where some unit conersions have been made. Any conversions cells still have formulas present to show changes made. Many of these have comments attached to at least the first cells when this occurs to explain if anything unorthodox occured., , # Organic Matter Impacts on Urban Soil Meta-Analysis

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdsm](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.h70rxwdsm)

## Description of the data and file structure

This dataset (all the excel files) has information from almost 50 papers that research the use of organic matter amendments (compost, biochar, and biosolids) on urban soils until July of 2023. The focus data collected is soil carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, bulk density, and pH. Other data includes sample size, sampling depth, years of application, application rate, type of urban environment, plant types, and publication information for each included study.

The file \"Urban Amendments (Y or N) sheet\" is the main data file. The has an extra column with a \"Yes\" or \"No\" depending on if organic matter amendment application occurred. A \"No\"' indicates the control samples within studies. This includes data for all the soil properties included in the meta-analysis as well. The main data in included in t...