Code and Data for "The Dynamics of an Estuarine and Brackish Coastal Biotic Community Captured in High Spatio-Temporal Resolution using Metabarcoding"

Estuaries and coasts are characterized by ecological dynamics that bridge the boundary between habitats, such as fresh and marine water bodies or the open sea and the land. Because of this, these ecosystems harbor ecosystem functions that shaped human history. At the same time, they display distinct dynamics on large and small temporal and spatial scales, impeding their study. Here we present a data set describing the community composition as well as abiotic state of an estuary and the coastal region close to it with unprecedented spatio-temporal resolution. We sampled fifteen locations in a weekly to twice weekly rhythm for a year across the Warnow river estuary and the Baltic Sea coast. This data set will be useful in analyzing anthropogenically impacted, highly dynamic ecosystems with high resolution.

File description:
figures_and_plots.r is the script used to generate the figures presented in the manuscript.
collected_algae_data.csv and collected_bacteria_data.csv contain data generated via Flow Cytometry using an autofluorescence or SYBR Green protocol, respectively.
combined_meta_data.csv contains metadata and the measurements of abiotic and biotic parameters including temperature, salinity, nutrient concentrations and Chlorophyll a concentrations.

otus_16s_filtered.csv, otus_18s_filtered.csv, otus_16s_full.csv, and otus_18s_full.csv are ASV tables recording bacterial (16S) and Eukaryote (18S rRNA) subcommunities either before (full) or after (filtered) applying a rarity filter.
taxonomy_16s.csv and taxonomy_18s.csv record the taxonomic assignment of the ASVs present in the ASV tables.