Protist Community Structure in Dairy Barns Under Two Management Systems

Shotgun metagenomic data from 118 samples describes the spatial composition and relative abundance of protist communities in a commercial dairy. The data compares protist diversity in manure, lagoons, troughs, and flies under flow-through and cross-vent barn management systems. Results include relative abundances of amoebas, alveolate parasites, water molds, ciliates, foraminifera, and diatoms.

Use Cases

• Compare protist diversity across dairy farm components (manure, lagoons, troughs, flies) based on spatial sampling.
• Assess the impact of barn management systems (flow-through vs. cross-vent) on protist community structure.
• Identify potential pathogen reservoirs (e.g., Neobalantidium coli) and carriers (e.g., Paramecium biaurelia) in agricultural settings.
• Analyze protist taxa carried by stable flies versus house flies based on metagenomic detection.

Strengths

• Includes 118 spatially distributed samples from a commercial dairy operation.
• Provides relative abundance percentages for six protist groups (e.g., 62.71% water molds, 23.31% ciliates).
• Compares two distinct barn management systems (flow-through and cross-vent).

Limitations

• Row count and column-level documentation are absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data reflects DNA detection only, not organism viability or disease occurrence, as stated in the description.
• Dataset size is 99.4 KB, indicating a limited scope of data.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Community shotgun metagenomic analysis of samples mapped to the CosmosID database.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-14 12:59:15; freshness should be verified.

Geography

A commercial dairy; specific location unknown.