Abstract
Coniferous forest soils represent a globally important carbon sink, where the microbiome is essential for carbon flux between tree roots, rhizosphere, litter and soil. Soil habitats, such as roots, rhizosphere, bulk soil and litter differ in physicochemical properties and composition of highly specialized microbial communities, whose activity reflects the seasonality of temperature and tree activity of these mid- to high-latitude biomes. Here we present a multi-omic dataset encompassing 160 samples collected from four coniferous forest soil habitats in the Czech Republic and Norway, sampled in early summer, late summer, early winter and late winter that characterize the composition, genomic potential and activity of tree roots and microbiome. For each sample, we provide metabarcoding-based composition of bacterial, fungal and eukaryotic communities, results of shotgun DNA sequencing (metagenomes) and shotgun RNA sequencing (metatranscriptomes) illustrating the functional potential and activity within habitats. This dataset enables analyses of the temporal variation of taxonomic composition, functional potential and transcription across seasons in a temperate and boreal coniferous forest.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (18-25706S), and by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004635), as well as by the Research Council of Norway (240859). A portion of this research was performed under the Facilities Integrating Collaborations for User Science (https://doi.org/10.46936/fics.proj.2016.49499/60006010) program and used resources at the DOE Joint Genome Institute (https://ror.org/04xm1d337) and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (grid.436923.9), which are DOE Office of Science User Facilities. Both facilities are sponsored by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research and operated under Contract Nos. DE-AC02-05CH11231 (JGI) and DE-AC05-76RL01830 (EMSL). ZRH acknowledges financial support received through the SFB1127 ChemBioSys (project number 239748522), which is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
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Human, Z.R., Štursová, M., Odriozola, I. et al. Seasonality of composition, genomic potential and activity of coniferous forest soil microbiomes.
Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07163-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07163-w
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