A dataset of soil nutrients from long-term fertilization experiments in subtropical paddy fields in 2024

Soil nutrients are essential for ensuring high and stable crop yields, which directly determine the fertility capacity and ecological function of agricultural soils. Dynamic monitoring of soil nutrients can help reveal the evolution trends of soil fertility under long-term fertilization management. Subtropical region of China is a key rice production base, where the improvement potential and the spatial heterogeneity of paddy soil nutrients are vital to the national food security. However, insufficient sharing of soil nutrient data at the regional scale leads to the uncertainty in assessing the effectiveness of different fertilization practices in improving soil fertility. This dataset is based on 12 long-term fertilization experiments located in Hunan Province initiated between 1986 and 2011. Fertilization treatments include no fertilizer (CK), conventional chemical fertilizer (CF), nitrogen-phosphorus fertilizer (NP), nitrogen-potassium fertilizer (NK), nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer (NPK), high-rate nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium fertilizer (hNPK), organic fertilizer replacing 30% of chemical fertilizer N (30% OM), 40% organic fertilizer replaces chemical fertilizer N (40% OM), 50% organic fertilizer replaces chemical fertilizer N (50% OM), 60% organic fertilizer replaces chemical fertilizer N (60% OM), 100% organic fertilizer (OM), and rice straw combined with NPK fertilizer (NPKS). After the late rice harvest in 2024, soil samples from the 0–20 cm soil layer were collected, and soil nutrients were analyzed according to standard methods to obtain the dataset of soil nutrients, including soil organic carbon, total nitrogen, total phosphorus, total potassium, nitrate nitrogen, ammonium nitrogen, alkali-hydrolysable nitrogen, available phosphorus, available potassium, and soil pH. The dataset comprises five parts: basic information of experimental plots, initial soil physicochemical properties, fertilizer application amounts of plots, analytical methods of soil samples, and soil nutrient contents. This dataset could provide not only data support for studying soil nutrient cycling processes and succession trends in subtropical paddy soils, but also the basic information for the fertilizer application and optimized management of regional paddy fields.