Global Dryland Soil Microbiome OTU and Environmental Data

Five spreadsheets contain Operational Taxonomic Unit tables for bacteria, fungi, and cercozoa from global drylands, alongside taxonomic assignments and site-specific environmental variables. The data underpins analyses in Pescador et al. 2022, with OTU tables rarefied to specific sequence depths for comparability. Databases include Greengenes for bacteria, UNITE for fungi, and PR2 for cercozoa, with stringent filtering applied to cercozoan sequences.

Use Cases

• Modeling relationships between soil microbial clusters and climatic aridity based on the provided environmental variables.
• Analyzing the co-occurrence network structure of bacterial, fungal, and cercozoan OTUs across global dryland sites.
• Classifying soil taxa using the provided taxonomic assignments linked to major reference databases.
• Investigating geographic patterns in soil organic carbon and climate variables across the surveyed field sites.

Strengths

• Includes three distinct OTU tables (bacteria, fungi, cercozoa) rarefied to specific sequence depths (e.g., 13,225 for bacteria).
• Taxonomic assignments are derived from authoritative reference databases: Greengenes, UNITE, and PR2.
• Environmental spreadsheet contains multiple site-level variables including coordinates, aridity index, temperature, and soil organic carbon.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale modeling.
• Last update date is unknown; freshness unverified.

Provenance

Source

Data from the paper by Pescador et al., hosted on paperswithcode.

Collection Method

Field site sampling and sequencing of 16S rRNA, ITS, and 18S rRNA genes, processed with UCLUST/VSEARCH and BLAST.

Geography

Global drylands, as indicated by site coordinates and the study's focus.