Soil bacterial communities after an experimental fire

We examined the distribution of bacterial taxa in Mediterranean soils after an experimental fire to infer processes underlying the community assembly of soil bacteria. Particularly, we pyrosequenced a phylogenetic marker (16S rRNA gene) to identify bacterial lineages in ten plots 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 4.5 months, 9 months and 12 months after the fire (i.e. 10 plots x 6 time points). Two samples (belonging to 1d and 9m time points) were discarded because they failed to amplify. The initial processing, which removed short sequences (< 200 bp), primers, barcodes, singletons and chimeric sequences, generated a total of 69143 sequencing reads (provided here), which were grouped into 3464 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) defined at 97% sequence identity. OTU assignations of each DNA sequence are also provided. Soil samples were characterized using 6 biochemical and 18 physical and chemical variables. DNA sequences of the same experiment before the fire can be found in http://www.ebi.ac.uk/ena/data/view/PRJEB6166