Shotgun metagenomics data of sediment microbiome of unprotected arid-tropical natural wetlands in South Africa

Sediment samples from 10 different arid-tropical natural wetlands in Limpopo Province, South Africa, were collected in August 2021 to investigate the microbial community structure, diversity, species richness, and functional metabolic potential. To achieve this, we employed the high-throughput Illumina NextSeq 2000 platform for shotgun sequencing of the sediment microbiome. The raw fastq files have been deposited in the NCBI SRA database as BioProject ID PRJNA972844 and Biosample accession numbers SRX20358958 to SRX20358949. The following tables represent supplementary material of a preliminary overview of the dataset in terms of the relative abundance of enzyme gene families (Table 1) and pathways (Table 2) across the wetland sediments detected from shotgun sequencing results.