Soils from calcareous grassland and arable fields from the South East of England and and a restoration chronosequence surveyed in 2016. The dataset comprises both, 16S bacterial and ITS fungal amplicon markers.

Data comprise soil microbial data collected for a survey of a restoration chronosequence with paired land use contrasts in South East England, 2016. The survey was part of the NERC project NE/M017125/1. Soil microbial data includes bacterial (16S Small subunit ribosomal RNA) and fungal (internal transcribed spacer region 2) amplicon sequences obtained via Illumina MiSeq sequencing.