Raw sequencing data for studying the colonization of soil communities after glacier retreat

Glaciers show a pattern of retreat at the global scale. Deglaciated areas are exposed and colonized by multiple organisms, but lack of global studies hampers a complete understanding of the future of these ecosystems. Until now, the complete reconstruction of soil communities was hampered by the complex identification of organisms, thus analyses at broad geographical and taxonomic scale have been so far impossible. The dataset used for this study represents the assemblages of Bacteria, Mycota, Eukaryota, Collembola (springtails), Oligochaeta (Earth worms), Insecta, Arthropoda and Vascular Plants obtained using environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding. eDNA was extracted from soil samples collected from multiple glacier forelands representative of some of the main mountain chains of Europe, Asia, the Americas and Oceania. We investigated chronosequences of glacier retreat (i.e., the chronological sequence of specific geomorphological features along deglaciated areas for which the date of glacier retreat is known) ranging from recent years to the Little Ice Age (~1850). We used this newly assembled global DNA metabarcoding dataset to obtain a complete reconstruction of community changes in novel ecosystems after glacier retreat. Information on assemblages can be then combined with analyses of soil, landscape and climate to identify the drivers of community changes.