Lake iTag measurements over nineteen years, introducing the limony dataset

Abstract

AbstractLakes are focal points of biogeochemical cycling on the terrestrial landscape, and microbial communities are the machines driving these processes. However, our view into how freshwater microbial communities function is obscured by high short-term variability. We provide a long-term, two-decade time series (years 2000 – 2019) of a freshwater microbial community characterized with 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. We provide raw sequencing data from 1,023 total sequenced samples and controls, as well as references to paired publicly available environmental data. Moreover, processed, curated, and formatted microbial data are also available for easy download as an R package, along with well-documented functions for subsetting the data by samples and taxa. This processed dataset includes 970 total replicates from 496 samples. The “limony” dataset and its paired environmental data is a complete and ready-to-use resource for ecologists, modellers, educators, data scientists, and others from diverse fields.