Soil microbial communities of a pH gradient in the hyper-arid Atacama Desert

Understanding the factors that modulate bacterial community assemblies in natural soils is a longstanding challenge in microbial community ecology. There is evidence that the community structure of soil bacteria is strongly influenced by abiotic environmental factors. However, positive and negative relationships among bacterial groups appear to play a key role in soil microbial community structure. In this work, we automatically compared two microbial association networks representing bacterial soil communities from two different sections of a pH gradient occurring along a western slope of the Andes, in the central Atacama Desert.