Soil microbial communities in a clonal oak dominated temperate grassland (temporal analyes of bacterial and fungal communities)

The study, for which these sequences were used, aimed to determine the effect of this intense natural drought event in 2028 on soil microbial communities under clonal oaks used as phytometers. For this, two different sites in Central Germany, Bad Lauchstaedt and Kreinitz, were studied. Each study site contained of two blocks of clonal oak tree saplings, which were produced via micropropagation to warrant their common genetic identity. Tree outplanting started in 2010 and ended in 2019.Soil sampling took place in September 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2021. For each target tree, based on tree age and outplaning year, three 0-15 cm soil cores were taken at 30 cm distance from the respective tree trunk and then pooled to one composite sample.Using Illumina MiSeq the fungal transcripted spacer region 2 (ITS2) and the bacterial V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNS gene were sequenced.