This is the final update to the following past news posts:
The NEON microbial community composition data products have been re-processed and are available on the NEON data portal either as provisional data (data from December 2014 and earlier) or in the initial NEON data release (data from 2015 through October 2018) that is available now.
These data have all been re-processed with an analysis pipeline based on QIIME2 that uses Dada2 to produce amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) that are then given putative taxonomic assignments using a reference database (SILVA for 16S, UNITE for ITS). The sequencing data are generated from paired-end sequencing, resulting in a forward read and a reverse read for each amplified DNA fragment that is sequenced. For 16S rRNA sequences (bacteria and archaea), both reads (forward and reverse) were considered together for read merging and downstream analysis. For ITS rRNA sequences (fungi), many of the reads were not able to be merged reliably, and therefore only forward reads were used for downstream analysis.