300 soil environmental samples Raw sequence reads

Understanding and quantifying the effects of environmental factors influencing the variation of abundance and diversity of microbial communities was a key theme of ecology. For microbial communities, there were two factors proposed in explaining the variation in current theory, which were contemporary environmental heterogeneity and historical events. Here, we report a study to profile soil microbial communitiy structure, which infers along the latitudinal gradient from the north to the south in China mainland, aiming to explore potential microbial responses to external condition, especially for global climate changes via a strategy of space-for-time substitution. Based on the Illumina sequencing technology, we showed that microbial communities were distinct for most but not all of the sites. Using substantial statistical analyses, exploring the dominant factor in influencing the soil microbial communities along the latitudinal gradient.