Plant community composition and traits modulate the impacts of drought intensity on soil microbial community composition and function

In an outdoor grassland mesocosm experiment, we determined the interactive effects of increasing drought intensity and grassland plant community resource acquisition strategy on soil bacterial and fungal communities during and after an experimental drought.DNA was extracted from 0.25 g fresh (frozen) soil using the DNeasy PowerSoil Pro Kit (Qiagen, Germany). The 16S rRNA (prokaryotes) and ITS (fungi) marker genes were sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq platform. We targeted the ITS2 gene determine fungal community composition using primer pair ITS86F - ITS4 (Vancov and Keen, 2009). This dataset includes the ITS (fungal) sequences. 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing data has been deposited in the NCBI database under BioProject accession numbers PRJNA1170931. Both the 16S rRNA and ITS communities were determined for each experimental unit.