Soil nitrogen properties and potential drivers urban and peri-urban forests in the Beijing metropolitan region

Three soil N properties (i.e., total N, alkali-hydrolyzable N, and δ15N) were investigated in forest patches of twenty parks across four urban-rural-natural transects in the Beijing region. Three anthropogenic variables (trunk road density being a surrogate for traffic N emissions; cropland share, being a surrogate for agricultural N emissions; age of each park, being a surrogate for the time of N accumulation) and two climate variables (MAT and MAP) were considered as the potential drivers for the spatial variation of soil N properties across the gradients. Author's permission is required to use the dataset.