Datasets for manuscript: Hysteresis in soil microbiome recovery following severe drought. Statistical analysis can be replicated in R by placing these files in a 'data' folder within the working directory and running the associated code. File descriptions: experimental_data.csv: Processed soil and microbial measures. sample_id: individual identifiers for each mesocosm; treatment: conditions prior to gradient phase of experiment, “field” = held at field moisture conditions, “drought” = at severe drought, “control” = samples taken prior to and after treatment phases; timepoint: sampling timepoint, “c1” and “c14” correspond to the control samples taken prior to, and immediately after, the treatment phase; wc = soil water content, expressed as % of fresh weight soil; whc = soil water content expressed as % of maximum water holding capacity; mbc = microbial biomass carbon; mbn = microbial biomass nitrogen; doc = water-extractable dissolved organic carbon; dtn = water-extractable dissolved total nitrogen; din = water-extractable dissolved inorganic nitrogen; don = water-extractable dissolved organic nitrogen. Units for microbial biomass and water extracts are reported as mg g-1 dry soil. 16s_seqtab.csv: ASV table for prokaryotes (16S), with ASVs as rows and samples as columns, with sample IDs corresponding to those in experimental_data.csv. Taxonomic information is appended at the end of the table. ITS_seqtab.csv: ASV table for fungi (ITS), with ASVs as rows and samples as columns, with sample IDs corresponding to those in experimental_data.csv. Taxonomic information is appended at the end of the table. 16s_tree.txt: Phylogenetic tree of the 500 most abundant prokaryotic ASVs (16S), in Newick format. ITS_tree.txt: Phylogenetic tree of fungal ASVs (ITS), in Newick format. 236 of the 500 most abundant fungal ASVs are represented on the tree. The remaining ASVs are omitted as they had no available family level taxonomy to allow grafting on to the backbone tree.