This dataset contains data from a field study conducted in 2019 and described in the manuscript "Diversity and specialization responses to climate and land use differ between deadwood fungi and bacteria".

To test the effects of land use and climate on diversity and community specialization (H2') of deadwood-inhabiting microbes, we exposed branches of four different tree species at 179 study sites, distributed over a spatial extent of 300 km x 300 km and 1000 m in elevation. Study sites were established in four local land-use types: forests, grasslands, arable sites, and settlements, embedded in near-natural, agricultural, or urban landscapes.

We used negative-binomial generalized linear models for diversity and calculated community specialization on host trees by using the standardized two-dimensional Shannon entropy (H2') and beta-regression models.

Our results show that host identity and hence specialization strongly exceed the effects of climate and land use for fungal but not bacterial communities. This suggests contrasting responses between microbial taxa to climate change and land-use intensification with further consequences on deadwood diversity interactions and hence decomposition processes.

We used powdery debris of the exposed branches and assessed OTUs via high-throughput sequencing

Datasets "Bac_wide_plot_final.rda" and "ITS_wide_plot_final.rda" contain data at study-plot level in a wide format; datasets "longdataBac_objects.rda" and "longdataITS_objects.rda" contain data at object-level in a long format.

Files are saved as .rda and can be opened in R.