'A Clear-cut Timepoint' – a Multi-omic Survey of Soil Microbial Communities Decades After Timber Harvesting - Seasonal Samples

The scarcity of long-term data on soil microbial communities in the decades following timber harvesting limits current understanding of the ecological challenges associated with maintaining the productivity of managed forests. This shortage of data is compounded by the complexity of soil communities and heterogeneity of forest and soil types. We sampled extensively from eighteen reforested sites in six different North American ecozones within the Long-term Soil Productivity (LTSP) Study and produced a highly replicated, multi-faceted data collection. The data were designed to contrast microbial community composition andfunction among forest soils from treatments harvested with varying intensities of organic matter removal. The collection includes 54 paired metagenomic/metatranscriptomic libraries collected seasonally (18 per summer, autumn and winter). related studies in this collection include 724 bacterial (16S) and 658 fungal (ITS2) amplicon libraries, 135 shotgun metagenomic libraries, as well as stable isotope probing amplicon libraries capturing the effects of harvesting on hemicellulolytic and cellulolytic populations. This collection serves as a foundation for the LTSP Study and other studies of the ecology of forest soil and of forest disturbances.