Davis Aerodrome Project (DAP) – hypolithic microbial communities

The Davis Aerodrome Project (DAP) collected a range of environmental survey data over several field seasons to support a comprehensive environmental assessment of the proposed aerodrome. This data includes flora, fauna, soils, lake ecosystem, nearshore, marine, air quality and meteorological information which has been collected by a number of different methods, and extends across the current Davis Station, proposed aerodrome and supporting infrastructure footprint (Ridge Site), previous sites considered for the aerodrome (Heidemann Valley, Adams Flat), as well as locations across the Vestfold Hills away from any of the proposed developments. This dataset includes high-throughput DNA sequencing data from hypolithic (under rock) microbial (bacterial and eukaryote) communities from the Vestfold Hills, collected by Dana Bergstrom and Patti Virtue, over the austral summer 2019/2020. 78 hypolithic community samples were processed, but only 68 or 60 yielded enough sequences for the bacterial and eukaryote communities, respectively. Bacterial communities (bacteria, including cyanobacteria but excluding Archaea) were characterised by sequencing the 16S ribosomal RNA gene on an Illumina MiSeq.Eukaryote communities were characterised by sequencing the nuclear 18S ribosomal RNA gene on an Illumina MiSeq. Eukaryote 18S sequences shorter than 300 base pairs were removed (most likely to represent sequencing errors). The bacterial and eukaryote FASTA files contain 2890 and 1016 DNA sequences, respectively, representing zero-radius operational taxonomic units (zOTUs, or unique DNA sequences).The zOTU tables are the sample-by-zOTU table (n=68 or 60) for the 2890 or 1016 bacterial or eukaryote zOTUs, and include the taxonomic assignments at Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family and Genus level for each zOTU. The mapping files include sample metadata, including collection notes on colour, number of DNA sequences obtained for the sample, and environmental variables derived using spatial analysis by Toby Travers (elevation etc.). Functional metabolic profiles for the prokaryote communities were inferred from the prokaryote community composition using a program called PiCRUSt2 (Langille et al., 2013). The data is provided in a similar set of files to the prokaryote data (a metabolic pathway-by-sample table, rounded to the nearest integer, a mapping/metadata file, and a “taxonomy” file that provides more detail on the metabolic pathways). More information on each metabolic pathway is available on the BioCyc website, https://biocyc.org/Note: several samples were surface algae and not true hypolithics and were removed except for the pathway files (see 'Hypolithic' column (TRUE/FALSE) in 'DAP_hypolithics_bact_map_68.CSV').