Data from: Distribution patterns of microbial communities in ultramafic landscape: a metagenetic approach highlights the strong relationships between diversity and environmental traits

Microbial species richness and assemblages across ultramafic ecosystems
were investigated to assess the relationship between their distributional
patterns and environmental traits. The structure of microorganism
communities in the Koniambo massif, New Caledonia, was investigated using
a metagenetic approach correlated with edaphic and floristic factors.
Vegetation cover and soil properties significantly shaped the large
phylogenetic distribution of operational taxonomic unit within microbial
populations, with a mean per habitat of 3.477 (±317) for bacteria and 712
(±43) for fungi. Using variance partitioning, we showed that the effect of
aboveground vegetation was the most significant descriptor for both
bacterial and fungal communities. The floristic significant predictors
explained 43% of the variation for both the bacterial and fungal community
structures, while the edaphic significant predictors explained only 32%
and 31% of these variations, respectively. These results confirm the
previous hypothesis that the distribution of microorganisms was more
structured by the vegetation cover rather than the edaphic characteristics
and that microbial diversity is not limited in ultramafic ecosystems.