China biocrust snow

Snow is the most widely distributed component of the cryosphere, which is highly sensitive to interannual and seasonal variations. Because of this climate change at any time and space scale is accompanied with changes in snow cover. For this reason snow cover has become the research focus in studies on global warming impact and response. In spite of this, the influence that snow exercises on soil bacterial communities is poorly investigated in temperate desert ecosystems. In this study, we evaluated the response of bacterial communities in the Gurbantunggut desert to snowfall change, created snow manipulations, and addressed the knowledge gap in the response of bacterial communities to snowfall changes.