Bacterial and fungal communities in biological soil crusts from Oman

Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) occur within drylands throughout the world, covering ~12% of the global terrestrial soil surface. Their occurrence in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula has rarely been reported and their spatial distribution, diversity, and microbial composition remained largely unexplored. We investigated biocrusts at six different locations in the coastal and central deserts of Oman. The biocrust types were characterized, and the bacterial and fungal community compositions of biocrusts and uncrusted soils were analysed by amplicon sequencing. For each sample two different libraries were prepared: one for the V3V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene (bacteria), and the other for the internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1; fungi). Sequences were processed in R using dada2. The code for sequence processing as well as statistical analysis, final OTU and taxonomy tables were archived on PANGAEA alongside the environmental information.