Analysis of Soil Microbial Data from NEON.

The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) is a continental-scale observatory that measures the causes and effects of climate change, land use change, and invasive species on U.S. ecosystems. One component of this observatory network is the function and diversity of soil microorganisms. The microbial data collected will include next generation sequencing data sets, including amplicon sequences of phylogenetic marker genes, metagenomes, and metatranscriptomes. Because on purpose of NEON is to provide freely available data and scientific infrastructure for researchers, it is critical that the sequence data, and associated metadata, are organized and archived in a way to make them easily accessible. This presentation will report on the outcomes of a workshop on the advanced analysis of genomic data in microbial ecology, which was held to grapple with the challenges and opportunities that the NEON microbial datasets will provide the scientific community.