Mechanisms of community organization and spatiotemporal patterns of soil microbial communities

Abstract

As an important component of terrestrial ecosystems, soil microbial communities are directly or indirectly involved in almost all soil ecological processes, including material cycles, energy conversion, and pollutant transformation. Studies of the spatiotemporal patterns of changes in soil microbial communities and the underlying mechanisms would help us determine the basic principle of microbial evolution, and would provide a scientific basis to predict the response, adaptation, and feedback of the microbial communities to environmental changes. In this review, we discuss the definition, analysis methods, and indices of soil microbial community. We argue that community could be the basic un..