Crossing Treeline: Bacterioplankton community composition in alpine and subalpine lakes of the Rocky Mountain southern ecoregion and associated physical and chemical characteristics

This dataset includes lake water samples collected in the summer of 2016 from 16 different mountain lakes in the Rocky mountains in both Rocky Mountain National Park and the Snowy Range of southern Wyoming. Each lake was sampled twice: once in the early summer when hydrologic connections with the surrounding terrestrial environment were high and again in the late summer when hydrologic connections were low. The main goal of the study was to compare communities of bacterioplankton in alpine and subalpine lakes to determine if communities differed across treeline as soil microbes in the surrounding terrestrial environment were. To do so, we collected water samples from the deepest point of each lake, mixed it with a surface water sample and characterized bacterioplankton communities with 16S sequencing technology. Additionally, we wanted to identify abiotic factors that may correlate with community dissimilarity and characterized a suite of chemical attributes for each lake. Lake characteristics reported included surface temperature, soluble reactive phosphorous (SRP), ammonia (NH3+), pH, total dissolved nitrogen (TDN), total dissolved phosphorus (TDP), and total dissolved organic carbon (DOC), and chlorophyll a (chl-a).