UC Berkeley

Coniferous forest soils represent a globally important carbon sink, where the microbiome is essential for carbon flux between tree roots, rhizosphere, litter and soil. Soil habitats, such as roots, rhizosphere, bulk soil and litter differ in physicochemical properties and composition of highly specialized microbial communities, whose activity reflects the seasonality of temperature and tree activity of these mid- to high-latitude biomes. Here we present a multi-omic dataset encompassing 160 samples collected from four coniferous forest soil habitats in the Czech Republic and Norway, sampled in early summer, late summer, early winter and late winter that characterize the composition, genomic potential and activity of tree roots and microbiome. For each sample, we provide metabarcoding-based composition of bacterial, fungal and eukaryotic communities, results of shotgun DNA sequencing (metagenomes) and shotgun RNA sequencing (metatranscriptomes) illustrating the functional potential and activity within habitats. This dataset enables analyses of the temporal variation of taxonomic composition, functional potential and transcription across seasons in a temperate and boreal coniferous forest.