Urban soils are a mixture of natural soil-forming factors and anthropogenic activities (Shuster and Dadio, 2018). ...they require an adapted set of indicators for a soil quality assessment. Furthermore, sample plots were assigned one of three garden habitat types: vegetable beds (i.e., annual vegetable plants), flower beds and berry cultivations (i.e., perennial flowers, roses, and berry shrubs), and lawn (i.e., meadows and turf). ...our study may help to analyze the effect of garden management or urbanization on soil quality (see Tresch et al., 2018) or provide data for modeling of carbon dynamics in urban soils or other soil based ecosystem services. Simon Tresch1,2,3*, Marco Moretti3, Renée-Claire Le Bayon1, Paul Mäder2, Andrea Zanetta3,4, David Frey3,5, Bernhard Stehle2,6, Anton Kuhn2, Adolphe Munyangabe2 and Andreas Fliessbach2 * 1Functional Ecology Laboratory, Institute of Biology, University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland * 2Department of Soil Sciences, Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), Frick, Switzerland * 3Biodiversity and Conservation Biology, Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL, Birmensdorf, Switzerland * 4Department of Environmental System Science, Institute of Terrestrial Ecosystems, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland * 5Department of Biology, University of Fribourg, Fribourg, Switzerland * 6Department of Biology, Ecology, University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany