Landscape-scale expansion of Ligularia virgaurea reshapes microbial assembly and nitrogen-cycle function in degraded alpine soils of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau

This dataset supports the article “Landscape-scale expansion of Ligularia virgaurea reshapes microbial assembly and nitrogen-cycle function in degraded alpine soils of the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau” submitted to Catena. It contains raw and processed data from a space-for-time gradient study of L. virgaurea density in alpine grasslands, including: soil physicochemical properties (pH, total nitrogen, bulk density, porosity, and moisture), amplicon sequencing data of bacterial (16S rRNA) and fungal (ITS) communities, microbial diversity indices, community assembly metrics, and co-occurrence network properties, outputs from structural equation modeling. The dataset enables replication of the analyses presented in the manuscript and can be reused to explore vegetation–soil–microbe interactions under alpine grassland degradation. Please cite both this dataset and the related article when using the data.