Long-term annual growing-season fire reduces plant diversity and homogenizes soil fungal communities in a longleaf pine savanna

This repository contains raw and processed data, metadata, and R scripts associated with a study examining how prescribed fire regimes influence fungal, bacterial, and plant communities in a longleaf pine ecosystem. The study was conducted across three sites (DL, FOJ, TOA) at the Jones Center at Ichauway, Georgia, USA, and compared annual growing-season burns with maintenance fire regimes (1-2 year fire return interval). Vegetation and soil samples were collected from 60 plots across the three field sites. Amplicon sequencing targeted fungal ITS2 and bacterial 16S rRNA gene regions. Fungal ITS2 sequences were generated using primers fITS7/ITS4 and bacterial 16S rRNA gene sequences targeted the V4 region using primers 515F/806R. Sequence data were processed using DADA2 within QIIME2 (version 2022.11), and taxonomy was assigned using the UNITE and SILVA reference databases. Sequence processing and downstream analyses were conducted in R and included alpha diversity, beta diversity, indicator species analyses, functional guild analyses, and community composition analyses. Repository contents README.txt file Raw and/or processed community data tables Metadata Taxonomic assignment tables R scripts used for statistical analyses and figure generation Supplementary code/figures associated with the manuscript Raw sequencing reads are available through the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under accession number: PRJNA1469031.