A global database of soil microbial communities and associated climate, soil and vegetation factors

Investigating the spatial and temporal variations in soil microbial compositions and diversities and the associated climate, soil and vegetation factors may aid in understanding the roles of microorganisms in soil ecosystems. Many studies involving high-throughput sequencing of soil bacteria and fungi have been published in the past decade. In this study, we constructed a global database of soil microbial communities and the associated climate, soil and vegetation factors, with sites on each of the seven continents and in eleven ecosystem types. There were 8490 sets of soil bacterial and fungal community data for the different treatments and study sites in the database, and the data were published from 2016 to 2024. Soil bacterial and fungal diversities were highly variable across various ecosystems. There was a highly significant (R2 = 0.4037, P < 0.001) linear regression relationship between the fungal and bacterial Shannon indices. Proteobacteria and Ascomycota were the most species-rich bacterial and fungal phyla, respectively, in most ecosystems. The median relative abundances of Proteobacteria and Ascomycota were 29.30 % and 57.49 %, respectively. The information (e.g., site names and ecosystem types) in the database enabled researchers to investigate where the most abundant bacterial or fungal phylum was located and whether the ecosystem type affected bacterial and fungal diversities and compositions at the global scale. We anticipated that this database could be further improved by adding more detailed information, such as bacterial and fungal compositions at the class, order, family, and genus levels.