Microbial communities in fluid fine tailings of first full-scale demonstration oil sands end pit lake: high-throughput sequencing data

Oil sands end pit lakes are a proposed mine closure landscape for fluid fine tailings and are created when fluid fine tailings are transferred to a mined-out pit and capped with water. In this study, tailings samples were collected from the first full-scale demonstration end pit lake in 2016 and 2017. High-throughput amplicon sequencing (Illumina MiSeq platform) of the 16S rRNA gene (V4 region) was used to characterize bacterial and archaeal communities in the samples.