Florida reef tract seawater microbial communities during SCTLD outbreak

The Florida Reef Tract is currently experiencing a widespread outbreak of Stony Coral Tissue Loss Disease (SCTLD). At the time of sample collection in 2019, there were only a couple of areas that had yet to show outbreaks of this disease, which included the Marquesas and Dry Tortugas National Park. During June 2019, we sampled seawater in 2L duplicates along the entire reef tract, from near Miami, Florida to the Dry Tortugas National Park to understand how the seawater microbial communities shifted along a wide geographic range and in the face of differing levels of SCTLD prevalence. All sequence data represent the V4 regions of the 16S rRNA gene of bacteria and archaea that were sequenced using the Illumina Miseq 2x250 bp.