Multi-year effects of combined warming and drought on soil bacterial and fungal communities in an early successional ecosystem
The goal of this project was to assess how soil bacterial and fungal communities responded to experimental warming and drought, individually and in combination, across seasons over three years in an early successional ecosystem in southwest Michigan, USA. This was a full factorial field experiment conducted at the Michigan State University Kellogg Biological Station Long Term Ecological Research (KBS LTER) site, and it included three treatments: warming, drought, and insecticide. Open top chambers (OTCs) were used to impose year round warming, and rainout shelters were used each growing season to simulate a 6 week drought. Soil samples were collected in the first (2021) and third (2023) years of the experiment, and the dataset includes amplicon sequences from all treatment combinations. Although the full experiment included an insecticide treatment, the paper associated with this dataset focuses only on the warming, drought, ambient, and combined warming and drought treatments. Data from the insecticide treatment are provided in the dataset for completeness but were not used in the analyses included in the paper.