SOMLIT-Astan: 18S rDNA OTU Time Series for Marine Plankton (2009-2016)

21,418 Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) derived from 18S V4 rDNA sequences track marine plankton community changes over eight years. The dataset contains ~30 million sequence reads from 375 samples collected twice monthly between 2009 and 2016 at the SOMLIT-Astan station. Nicolas Henry from the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique assembled the data using a pipeline documented on Zenodo.

Use Cases

• Analyze temporal biodiversity trends based on OTU abundance across 375 time points.
• Model community assembly based on OTU spread and cloud size metrics.
• Validate taxonomic assignments based on identity scores against the PR2 reference database.
• Compare plankton size fractions based on sample filtration metadata (0.2 µm vs. 3 µm).

Strengths

• 375 samples provide a high-resolution time series spanning 8 years (2009-2016).
• ~30 million sequence reads offer substantial sequencing depth for community analysis.
• 21,418 OTUs represent a detailed view of eukaryotic plankton diversity.
• Includes quality metrics (minimum expected error) and taxonomic paths for each OTU.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred from the description.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Collection Method

Amplicon sequencing of the 18S V4 rDNA region, processed through a bioinformatics pipeline (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5791089).

Time Range

2009-2016

Geography

SOMLIT-Astan station (specific location not detailed in input).