The potential of retrieving microbial community structure from archived soils

Deciphering the temporal dynamics of soil microbial community is a fundamental issue. To determine whether long-term air-dried soils can be used to characterize microbial community, a time series experiment on microbial community during air-drying and archiving was conducted. Fresh soil of different fertilization treatments was sampled from the North China Plain, air-dried, archived, and collected at specific intervals (from 0 h to 8192 h). Then, the microbial community was characterized by Illumina sequencing. This submission includes soil prokaryotic community from 236 samples and soil fungal community from 300 samples.