Characterization of plankton communities and associated physicochemical metadata from onshore/offshore transects along the Beaufort Sea Shelf during different upwelling states in August-September 2017

DNA samples were collected by filtration of 1.3-4.4 liters (L) of seawater collected from the surface and chlorophyll maximum onto 0.2 micrometer (um) sterivex filters and frozen at sea. Samples were collected from repeat occupations of onshore-offshore transects that occurred before, during, and after wind-driven upwelling events. Following DNA extraction, 18S amplicon sequencing was used to characterize the eukaryotic plankton community (raw sequence data submitted to National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive, NCBI SRA). Additionally, quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) was used to quantify gene abundance of specific phytoplankton species. This dataset records the sample collection information (date, time, latitude, longitude, station id, conductivity-temperature-depth (CTD) bottle number, depth of sample collection, volume filtered, filter size), pertinent physicochemical metadata from the CTD sensors when each sample was collected (pressure, temperature, salinity, density, fluorescence), qPCR gene abundance, and the ratio of sequencing reads for individual phytoplankton species as a part of the whole phytoplankton community amplicon sequencing read dataset for each sample.