The authors analyzed a total of 3,002,411 quality-filtered bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequences in the 48 technical replicates across 8 revegetation chronosequence sites, consisting of 3,316 OTUs. Nine bacterial phyla dominated this dataset, including Acidobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi, Firmicutes, Gemmatimonadetes, Planctomycetes, Proteobacteria and Verrucomicrobia.The OTU data provide information on bacterial flux at this restoration site through a stagger of years and can be used accordingly.
Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
The authors thank A. Bissett, A. Fitzgerald, A. Young, Z. Baruch, S. Caddy-Retalic, L. Clarke, S. Kennedy, I. Fox, M. Laws, K. McCallum, and J. McDonald for technical and field assistance. We are grateful for technical, field and site access support from the Australian Genome Research Facility, BioPlatforms Australia, SA Water and the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network. This work was supported by Australian Research Council funding to AJL and MFB (DE150100542; DP150103414).
Purpose
This project forms part of the authors PhD. The OTU data was generated for a manuscript in Molecular Ecology "Revegetation rewilds the soil bacterial microbiome of an old field" https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.14081 that uses eDNA assessment to provide a significant extension to current restoration monitoring practice.
Lineage
EDNA metabarcoding: Three 25 m x 25 m quadrats were randomly selected per site, giving a total of 24 quadrats across the 8 sites. Soil was sampled from the 0-10 cm and 20-30 cm soil horizons at each quadrat. A representative 50 g sample of soil was collected at each of these 24 quadrats by pooling nine soil samples from each soil depth, including soil from open areas and under plants. These nine soil samples were pooled into a sterile plastic bag, and homogenised using a sterilised trowel. All soil samples (n = 48) were frozen on site in sterile 50 mL falcon tubes until DNA extraction- hereafter referred to as technical replicates.