Bacterial and fungal soil communities of four calcareous glacier forefields in the Alps

Bacterial-fungal interactions in recently deglaciated ecosystems promote biogeochemical cycles, mineral soil fertility, and pioneer plant growth, but the diversity of keystone microbes and the quality of their interactions remain largely unexplored. Here, we investigated the diversity of both fungal and bacterial communities to predict core microbial networks and to estimate conserved interactions across comparable deglaciated systems. We studied the soil fungal and bacterial communities at the early stages of soil development (0-25 years ice-free soil) in four receding calcareous glaciers of the Alps (>200 samples). High-resolution marker-gene (16S-V4 and ITS2) sequences were collected.