Archaeal community on Tibetan plateau

The Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau is experiencing a rapid warming and wetting since the 1950s. However, there was limited information about how the projected climate change will impact on the soil microbial community vertically? 144 soil samples were collected at 24 different sites along a temperature and precipitation gradient (substituted by aridity index ranging from 0.079 to 0.89) of the Tibetan Plateau. We found obvious different thresholds between the aridity index (AI) and archaeal communities in topsoils and soils sublayers. The results indicated that the projected warming and wetting will have a strong impact on soil microbial communities, but mommunity in deep soils were more sensitive to climate change.