Data from: Warming-induced effects on microbial communities and nitrogen cycling capacity in tundra litter

Climate warming is changing tundra vegetation in the Arctic, with
implications for plant litter properties. To address potential
warming effects, we characterized the responses of bacterial and fungal
communities and their genetically encoded capacity for inorganic
nitrogen-transformations in the litter layer, as well as 15N natural
abundance in the underlying soil layer as an integrated measure of
nitrogen processes in the soil, in 16 long-term alpine and Arctic tundra
warming experiments distributed across 12 circumpolar locations. While
local conditions primarily shaped microbial communities, warming
indirectly affected microbial nitrogen-cycling potentials through changes
in herb dominance and litter mass, resulting in enhanced links between
litter nitrogen cycling potentials and δ¹⁵N in the underlying soil. Our
results suggest that warming-driven vegetation changes may intensify
nitrogen-cycling with possible positive feedback on plant growth and
ecosystem respiration across the tundra biome. The data includes 1) Sample
metadata, including site information, and litter sample measurements of
abiotic properties, abundance of nitrogen cycling genes, and abundance and
composition of bacterial and fungal communities (Data Table 1, including
"README"), 2) and Plant community data in each sampled plot or
OTC at the sites (Data Table 2, including "README").
The 16S rRNA gene and ITS2 sequences of prokaryotic and fungal
communities, respectively, are deposited at the NCBI database under the
BioProject PRJNA760312 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/).