Talabre Lejia Transect soil Raw sequence reads

Estimating plant diversity in extreme and arid environments is particularly important and challenging as plants can escape prolonged stress periods through seeds or specialized underground organs. To establish plant diversity in the Atacama Desert, we performed analysis of environmental DNA (eDNA) in soil samples using high-throughput sequencing. To do so we amplified the plant P6 loop of the trnL intron and sequence this barcode using Illumina MiSeq technology.