| Summary: | Despite their importance to sediment biogeochemical processes and marine food webs, meiofauna are notoriously difficult to characterize because components of the fauna are poorly preserved in sediment samples, lack obvious morphological features, and are extremely small in size (~45 m – 1 mm); thus, they have been largely ignored in many regions including the Arctic. This dataset describes the first baseline surveys of benthic metazoan meiofauna in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas using high-throughput gene sequencing of environmental DNA extracts from sediment samples and demonstrates the utility of DNA-based approaches as an alternative to the standard microscopy techniques for rapid assessment of meiofaunal community structure. We used amplicon sequencing of the 18S rRNA gene to provide a baseline assessment of metazoan eukaryotic community structure in sediments from 120 locations distributed throughout the NE Chukchi and US and Canadian Beaufort Sea shelf and slope and generated a morphology-based inventory of the Nematoda at a subset of these sites based on expert taxonomic identifications. Morphology data was compared with the results of 18S amplicon surveys to determine that similar information is obtained through both approaches. Moreover, the Nematoda 18S dataset is correlated with the full Metazoa 18S dataset, suggesting this group may reflect important environmental drivers governing the assembly of whole communities in this region. The results presented here offer a broad overview of the taxonomic composition of the sequence dataset, and examine broad-scale regional patterns in community structure. Specific data types constituting this dataset include: matrices of Nematode genera recorded across sample sites; shotgun metagenomic sequence data generated in 2014 for 15 sample sites in the Beaufort Sea; environmental PCR amplicons targeting the 18S rRNA gene generated in Illumina MiSeq sequencing runs in 2014 and 2016; and PCR amplified partial 18S sequences amplified from 48 individual nematode specimens.
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