Fairbanks Permaforst Experiment Station Soil Metagenomics. FPES Metagenomics

The Fairbanks Permafrost Experiment Station (FPES) is located in interior Alaska (64.877˚N, 147.670˚W) and is part of the US Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL). FPES is divided into three Linell plots: undisturbed (UD), semi disturbed (SD), and most disturbed (MD). When these three plots were created in 1946, the first plot, UD, was left untouched. The second plot (SD) was cleared of trees and above ground vegetation by hand, but the roots and other organic material were left intact. The third plot (MD) was stripped of all vegetation and surface level organic material down to mineral soil. Over the next 25 years, total stripping (MD) led to permafrost thaw and degradation to 6.7 m below surface level, and partial stripping (SD) led to thaw 4.7 m below surface level. These plots were created to simulate soil disturbance events and to then identify potential ecological effects.We collected 48 soil cores from FPES on 28 May 2018, 16 individual cores at each FPES treatment level. Using an established grid layout of FPES, we took cores from four selected quadrats per plot to demonstrate the fine-scale heterogeneity of the sample site. At each quadrat we took four samples at the corners, approximately 1 m apart. We utilized a sterile technique to sample soil and at each sampling point, the top layer of moss and vegetation was removed. We used a soil corer (4.5 cm diameter by 10 cm height) to collect the top 10 cm of soil.