Rhizosphere and Root-Endosphere Fungal Communities of Ancient Platycladus orientalis from the Taihang Mountain Region
Rhizosphere fungal communities constitute a critical nexus between plants and soils, facilitating nutrient acquisition, enhancing stress tolerance, and sustaining ecosystem functioning. Understanding fungal diversity in the rhizosphere and root endosphere of ancient trees is critical for clarifying the symbioses that sustain host health and ecosystem functioning, tapping distinctive microbial resources, gauging ecological responses to environmental change, and guiding evidence-based conservation of venerable Platycladus orientalis. However, for the Taihang Mountains, publicly available datasets that combine community profiling of rhizosphere and endophytic fungi with open raw reads and complete metadata are still rare. We surveyed ancient Platycladus orientalis in the Beijing portion of the Taihang Mountains, collecting paired rhizospheric soil and fine-root samples for ITS amplicon library construction and sequencing. In parallel, we measured site-specific soil physicochemical attributes and enzyme activities, producing a reusable dataset with matched environmental metadata. A unified workflow was implemented for plot selection, field sampling, DNA extraction and amplification, library preparation, and sequencing; standardized quality control and chimera removal were applied to generate sequence tables and taxonomic annotations, accompanied by publicly released sample- and environment-level metadata. The resulting dataset provides a reusable reference for investigating spatial partitioning and site effects in root-associated fungal communities of ancient cypress. It enables independent reanalysis and methodological benchmarking on identical primary data, thereby advancing research on tree-associated microecology and supporting science-based protection of ancient P. orientalis.