Culicoides biting midges are important vectors of diverse microbes such as viruses, protozoa, and nematodes that cause diseases in wild and domestic animals. However, little is known about the role of microbial communities in midge larval habitat utilization in the wild. In this study, we characterized microbial communities (bacterial, protistan, fungal and metazoan) in soils from disturbed (bison and cattle grazed) and undisturbed (non-grazed) pond and spring potential midge larval habitats. We evaluated the influence of habitat and grazing disturbance and their interaction on microbial communities, diversity, presence of midges, and soil properties. These data can be used to better understand environmental microbial communities in tallgrass prairie ecosystems associated with grazed versus ungrazed pond and spring habitats and to draw inferences on the interactions of these communities and soil properties with the presence of biting midge larvae. These data should not be used to make inferences for ecosystems other than tallgrass prairie, for animal management methods other than open cow-calf or bison grazing (such as feedlots, dairies, or stockyards), or for other grazing mammals (such as sheep or goats). These data were collected between the months of September and December and therefore are not representative of microbial communities present from January through August. Abbreviations used include Total Carbon (TC), Total Nitrogen (TN), Organic Matter (OM), Konza Prairie Biological Station (KPBS), Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU), Principal Coordinates Analysis (PCoA), ribosomal RNA (rRNA), and vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV).

The raw Illumina MiSeq sequence data for this project can be found here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA862140

Resources in this dataset:

• Resource Title: Metadata for Midge Larval Habitat Soil Microbiome File Name: Metadata for NCBI Accession PRJNA862140.xlsx Resource Description: This spreadsheet links the raw sequence reads on NCBI with data on the presence/absence of Culicoides midges and soil chemistry data (% total soil nitrogen, % total soil carbon, and % organic matter).