Inorganic nitrogen, microbial ecoenzymatic activities, and organic matter in soils collected from the Monsoon Rainfall Manipulation Experiment (MRME), Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico during the 2014 growing season

Drylands are characterized by a pulse dynamics framework in which episodic rain events trigger brief pulses of biological activity and resource availability that regulate primary production in these ecosystems. Relatively small rain events can stimulate microbial processes like decomposition that release inorganic nitrogen needed by plant processes, which typically also depend on soil moisture received from larger rain events. Little is known how changes in rainfall patterns may affect plant available nitrogen in dryland soils, particularly across temporal scales. Therefore, we conducted a study to examine the daily and seasonal responses of plant available nitrogen to rain events that differed in size and frequency throughout a summer monsoon in a northern Chihuahuan Desert grassland located in the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, USA. This data package, which accompanies an associated manuscript (Brown et al. 2022), contains measurements of inorganic nitrogen, nitrogen-acquiring microbial ecoenzymatic activities, and organic matter in soils collected from the Monsoon Rainfall Manipulation Experiment (MRME) during the 2014 summer growing season.