A data archive for microbiome and metabolome data for major soil types in the USA

Soils harbor an immense diversity of microorganisms — the most biodiverse habitat on Earth — which govern the fate of our planet's largest store of organic carbon (SOC). At present, our ability to predict the impact of climate change and disturbance on the persistence of SOC is limited by the lack of data capturing informative differences among soils at relevant scales. The processes of SOC formation and loss are governed by complex adaptive systems which are top-down, such as climate, land-use, geology, and bottom-up, including the physicochemical and biological properties of soil. Despite the complexity and heterogeneity of soils, we find stable associations within and between soil types. We hypothesize that soil taxonomy serves as an appropriate categorical scale where the top-down and bottom-up processes driving soil formation and C-cycling can be defined. We are leading an effort to build a large library that integrates modern assays of chemical and biological diversity in ways that assist terrestrial ecosystem models. In this project, we characterized the chemical (metabolome) and microbial (16S and ITS amplicon libraries) signatures of 50 paired surface (0-10 cm) and subsurface (~1 m below the surface) soils from diverse biomes and soil orders.