This is the dataset to accompany the article:
Tylianakis J.M., Martinez-Garcia L.B., Richardson S.J., Peltzer D.A. & Dickie I.A. (2018) Symmetric assembly and disassembly processes in an ecological network. Ecology Letters.
It contains data on associations between plants (variable: plant_species) and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (variable: fungal_OTU), sampled from sites of various ages (times since exposure, variable: site_age) along the Franz Josef chronosequence. Plant species and fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were identified using T-RFLP. Plants were identified by comparing T-RFLP profiles to known samples. In cases where two species names were given, these two could not be distinguished from their profiles. Fungal OTU names are uninformative, though used consistently throughout the dataset. Therefore, a given name represents a single OTU across sites. Each sample (a root fragment from a given plant species, variable: sample) is individually numbered, though multiple fungal taxa were often identified from a single plant sample. Each row in the dataset represents a fungal OTU detected in a plant root sample from a given site.
For details of sampling and T_RFLP analysis, see Martínez-García L.B., Richardson S.J., Tylianakis J.M., Peltzer D.A. & Dickie I.A. (2014) Host identity is a dominant driver of mycorrhizal fungal community composition during ecosystem development. New Phytologist. 205, 1565-1576.