Soil Lake Inundation Moat Experiment (SLIME): Physical, chemical, and biological measurements from planktonic water columns, McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica (2018-2020)

The Soil Lake Inundation Moat Experiment (SLIME) was developed by the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (MCM LTER) project to investigate the ecological function of lake moats in Antarctica. These moats form during the austral summer when the margins of permanently ice-covered, closed-basin lakes melt, creating open-water zones, or ‘moats,’ between the shoreline and the thick (3-5 m) perennial ice cover. To study these habitats, sampling transects were established on the north and south shores of Lake Fryxell and the East Lobe of Lake Bonney. This data package includes three seasons of physical, chemical, and biological measurements from the planktonic water columns of these lakes, collected from SLIME transects between January 2018 and January 2020. Parameters include water temperature, conductivity, ion and nutrient concentrations, chlorophyll-a concentrations, as well as fluorescence and photochemical efficiencies for major algal classes. NCBI accession numbers are also provided for the microbial sequence data associated with each sample.