Effects of soil warming and thermokarst on soil microbial communities in the High Canadian Arctic, 2005-2021.

• Main Authors: Ina Timling, Lee Taylor, Cristina Takacs-Vesbach, Skip Walker
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Arctic Data Center 2022
• Subjects: High Canadian Arctic; permafrost soils; fungi; bacteria; warming; thermokarst; Arctic; Northwest Territories; Canada; Isachsen; Mould Bay; Ellef Ringnes Island; Prince Patrick Island; Banks Island; Climate change; Ice; permafrost; Thermokarst
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.18739/A2T14TQ8P

Soil microbes are not only key drivers for nutrient and energy cycles, but they are also fast responders to changes in their environment- and as such act as bioindicators of climate change. The temperatures in the Arctic are warming two times faster than at lower latitudes and lead to warming of permafrost soils, an increase of the active layer and eventually to thermokarst, the thawing of permafrost. Thawing permafrost affects the hydrological systems and increases the potential of old carbon becoming available for decomposition. The fate of carbon stores will rest largely on the response of plant and microbial communities to the changed conditions. Especially the ice rich permafrost soils in the High Arctic are highly sensitive to increasing air temperatures, because the permafrost occurs close to the surface and the soils lack the insulation provided by a thick vegetation cover and organic soil horizons as found in the Low Arctic (Farquharson et al. 2019). This study examines the effects of soil warming and thermokarst on fungal and bacterial communities of active layer soils in the three most northern bioclimatic subzones (A, B, C) of the Arctic that occurred over 10 years (2005-2016). We used Illumina sequencing to analyze the fungal and bacterial communities and obtained environmental data to investigate the effect of warming and thermokarst on fungal and bacterial communities in the High Arctic. Here we present the assembled fungal, bacterial and environmental data sets.