Structures and determinants of soil microbiomes along a steep elevation gradient in Southwest China.

Soil microbial communities play a vital role in accelerating nutrient cycling and stabilizing ecosystem functions in forests. However, the diversity of soil microbiome and the mechanisms driving their distribution patterns along elevational gradients in montane areas remain largely unknown. In this study, we investigated the soil microbial diversity along an elevational gradient from 650 m to 3,800 m above sea level in southeast Tibet, China, through DNA metabarcode sequencing of both the bacterial and fungal communities. Our results showed that the dominant bacterial phyla across elevations were Proteobacteria, Acidobacteriota and Actinobacteriota, and the dominant fungal phyla were Ascomycota and Basidiomycota. The Simpson indices of both soil bacteria and fungi demonstrated a hollow trend along the elevational gradient, with an abrupt decrease in bacterial and fungal diversity at 2,600 m a.s.l. in coniferous and broad-leaved mixed forests (CBM). Soil bacterial chemoheterotrophy was the dominant lifestyle and was predicted to decrease with increasing elevation. In terms of fungal lifestyles, saprophytic and symbiotic fungi were the dominant functional communities but their relative abundance was negatively correlated with increasing elevation. Environmental factors including vegetation type (VEG), altitude (ALT), soil pH, total phosphorus (TP), nitrate nitrogen (NO