soil microbial communities between farmland and grassland in arid and semiarid areas

It is critical to identify the assembly processes and determinants of soil microbial communities to better predict soil microbial responses to environmental change in arid and semiarid areas. Here, soils from 16 grassland-only, 9 paired grassland and farmland, and 16 farmland-only sites, were collected across the central Inner Mongolia Plateau covering a steep environmental gradient. Through analyzing the paired samples, we discovered that land uses had strong effects on soil microbial communities, but weak effects on their assembly processes.