Biocrust environmental data across Chinese deserts

One of the key goals of ecology is to understand how communities are assembled. The species co-existence theory suggests that community β-diversity is influenced by species pool and community assembly processes, such as environmental filtering, dispersal events, ecological drift, and biotic interactions. However, it remains unclear whether there are similar β-diversity patterns among different soil microbial groups and whether all these mechanisms play significant roles in mediating β-diversity patterns. By conducting a broad survey across Chinese deserts, we aimed to address these questions by investing biological soil crusts (biocrusts). Through amplicon-sequencing, we acquired β-diversity data for multiple microbial groups, that is, soil total bacteria, diazotrophs, phoD-harbouring taxa, and fungi. Our results have shown varying distance decay rates of β-diversity across microbial groups, with soil total bacteria showing a weaker distance-decay relationship than other groups. The imp..., Detailed data collection and measurement please see the article \"Consistent community assembly but contingent species pool effects drive β-diversity patterns of multiple microbial groups in desert biocrust systems\"., , # Biocrust environmental data across Chinese deserts

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z08kprrk8](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.z08kprrk8)

This dataset contains sampling site locations of biocrusts across five Chinese deserts, along with measurements of physicochemical properties and gene copy numbers of the biocrusts. The testing techniques are detailed in our upcoming paper titled \"Consistent community assembly but contingent species pool effects drive β-diversity patterns of multiple microbial groups in desert biocrust systems\" which is slated for publication in Molecular Ecology, as well as in a previous paper published in Soil Biology and Biochemistry [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2023.109165](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2023.109165).

## Description of the data and file structure

I hereby provided the description of each column. 

* \"Sample_name\" = The ID during field sampling, this also corresponds to the sample name of our NCBI sequences;
* \"Barcode_NO\" = The barc...