Soil microbial communities in dry and moist tropical forests exhibit distinct shifts in community composition but not diversity with succession

Metadata, R scripts and ASV abundance tables.
Our study was conducted at two sites that represent dry (Los Santos) and moist (Agua Salud) tropical lowland forest types in Panama. The two sites have distinct tree species composition and richness, with relatively little species overlap. We collected 36 surface soil samples (0 to 15 cm depth) in three land use categories (cattle pasture, 20 year old secondary forest, and old secondary forest) at each site during the wet season. Cores were sampled at 10 m intervals along four replicate transects in each of the three land use categories at each site. Soil microbial communities were characterized using DNA meta barcoding using the primer sets 515F - 806R (Bacteria 16S V4 region, Caporaso et al. 2011), ITS1F - ITS2R (Fungi ITS1 rRNA region, White et al. 1990), and AMV4.5NF - AMDGR (AMF 18S rRNA region, van Geel et al. 2014) and sequenced on an Illumina MiSeq with 2x250 bp paired end sequencing. Data were processed using the R packages DADA2, phyloseq, vegan, microbiome, and associated packages. Sample metadata includes soil chemistry and alpha diversity calculations for each sample. Vegetation data was collected from the same plots as the soil samples. Raw fastq files and metadata can be found in the NCBI SRA archive in BioProject PRJNA1159263