NGEE Arctic Microbial Communities of Polygonal Grounds

Arctic soils contain an estimated 12-42% of the global soil C and much of this carbon is trapped in permafrost. With increasing global temperatures, thawing permafrost is becoming a potential source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. On the Alaskan North Slope the collapse and rise of soil due to formation of ice wedges and permafrost thaw create distinct features called polygons. As part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Next Generation Ecosystem Experiment (NGEE) in the Arctic, we collected seasonally thawed active layer soils across a transect of polygon features at the Barrow Environmental Observatory (BEO). We used Illumina HiSeq technology to sequence metagenomes. The sequence data was accompanied by GHG flux measurements, geophysical and geochemical soil characteristics.