title: Soil fungal ITS amplicon from 1082 m amsl, Cultivated soil
design: Soil samples were collected from three elevational zones representing cultivated and fallow land-use systems in the Uluguru Mountains, Morogoro, Tanzania, to assess fungal community diversity. Total metagenomic DNA was extracted from approximately 10 g of homogenized soil using the ZymoBIOMICS DNA Miniprep Kit following the manufacturer protocol. DNA quality was verified by agarose gel electrophoresis and quantified using a Nanodrop 2000 spectrophotometer. Amplicon-based high-throughput sequencing targeting the fungal ITS1-ITS2 region was performed by Macrogen Inc. using the Illumina MiniSeq platform with paired-end reads (2 x 301 bp), generating approximately 50,000 paired-end reads per sample. Raw FASTQ files were produced for downstream taxonomic and diversity analyses.