This data was collected as part of a study to understand the connectivity and diversity of stream bacteria communities in streams flowing from high to low elevation through different types of urbanization and in different seasons. The dataset contains OTU (operational taxonomic units, the bacterial surrogate for species) abundance for bacteria at iUTAH aquatic GAMUT sites (http://data.iutahepscor.org/mdf/Data/Gamut_Network/) in three watersheds at 3 time points (November 2014, February 2015, and May 2015). Briefly, we filtered water column samples onto 0.2 um membrane filters, which were dissolved and processed with MOBIO Power Soil DNA extraction kits (alternate low protocol yield using phenol chloroform). We sequenced bacterial DNA (PCR-amplified using V4 region specific primers) using Illumina Hi-Seq. We cleaned, clustered (using 97% OTU similarity cut-off) and aligned sequences using the Kozich et al. 2013 protocol, and classified OTUs to taxonomy based on the SILVA bacteria database. Code used for processing is available at https://github.com/erinfjones/mothurcode.

There are three files; site and sample metadata (e.g. date sampled) is included in the file stream_design.txt, observed OTU counts by sample are in the .shared file, and the taxonomic classification of OTUs is in the .taxonomy file.

Also included are zipped folders containing raw fastq files.

Kozich JJ, Westcott SL, Baxter NT, Highlander SK, Schloss PD. (2013): Development of a dual-index sequencing strategy and curation pipeline for analyzing amplicon sequence data on the MiSeq Illumina sequencing platform. Applied and Environmental Microbiology. 79(17):5112-20.