Mitochondrial COXI sequences and associated metazoan abundances in soils collected from the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica from 1995 to 2022

As part of an ongoing long-term sampling effort conducted by the McMurdo Dry Valleys Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) project, the top 10 cm of soil was collected from sampling sites across the McMurdo Dry Valleys region of Antarctica. A subset of these samples representing each valley and a differing disturbance legacy from the last glacial maximum were analyzed for this data package. Samples were collected between 1995 and 2022. In each sample, the abundances of three genera of nematodes (Scottnema, Eudorylaimus, and Plectus), tardigrades, and rotifers were calculated. Following metazoan extractions, individual Scottnema lindsayae were selected for mitochondrial Cytochrome c oxidase I (COX1) Sanger dideoxy sequencing. Sequencing resulted in 249 assembled sequences of 285 base pairs after alignment and trimming.