Bacterial community diversity on analog site sandy beaches before and after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Grand Isle, Louisiana, and Dauphin Island, Alabama, 5-3-2010 to 5-20-2011.

Sandy beaches support a wide variety of underappreciated biodiversity that is critical to coastal ecosystems. Prior to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the diversity and function of supratidal beach sediment microbial communities along the Gulf of Mexico coastlines were not well understood. As such, it was unclear if microbial community compositional changed would occur following exposure to beached oil, if indigenous communities could biodegrade oil, or how cleanup efforts, such as sandwashing and sediment redistribution, would impact microbial ecosystem resiliency. Transects perpendicular to the shoreline were sampled from public beaches on Grand Isle, Louisiana, and Dauphin Island, Alabama, over one year. NCBI data link: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/170912.