Soil microbial communities respond quickly to agricultural land uses and management prac- tices. To assess the effects of contrasted land-use history on microbial diversity dynamics induced by a wheat straw amendment, an in situ experiment was conducted on adjacent plots with dif- ferent land use-history (20 years croplands or 17 years grasslands in Lusignan, France). A metabarcoding study conducted previously1 highlighted the compositional differences in bacte- rial, archaeal and fungal successions in the two types of soils. To explore the whole microbial communities’ responses (especially viral and eukaryotic dynamics), a global metagenomic ap- proach was used on the same samples. About 2 billion paired-ends reads (Illumina 2*150bp) were obtained for a total of 48 samples. After quality control steps, Kaiju v.1.7.0 was used to taxo- nomically assign the reads. These taxonomic counts were then used to follow the dynamics of the total microbial communities. Metagenomics and metabarcoding results were concordant, with similar dynamics for bacterial and fungal genera, which confirms the validity of both approaches. Then, we defined clusters of genera: (i) specific to either grassland or cropland systems, and/or (ii) responding at different time points after the amendment. A high increase of viral sequences shortly after amendment, alongside stimulation of particular bacterial and fungal fast-growing populations, might suggest a regulatory role of viruses in soils. Differential responses of micro- bial groups provide new insights into the ecology of the communities involved in C turnover in soil. This metagenomic dataset will also be used to study the functional potential of these communities in carbon cycling.