ArticleFrontiers in microbiology2026
Spatiotemporal dynamics of soil bacterial and fungal communities at a small scale.
Article in Frontiers in microbiology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Soil is a common form of trace evidence in forensic investigations, and its indigenous microbial communities hold promise for geographic provenance determination. However, most existing studies focus on macro-scale soil microbial patterns, with limited understanding of their small-scale spatiotemporal dynamics. This study collected soil samples across multiple time points from a small-scale forest site in Guiyang, China, to characterize bacterial and fungal community distributions. We aimed to quantify the effects of temporal variation and geographic distance on soil bacterial and fungal community structure, and to evaluate their utility as biomarkers for geographic provenance inference. Methods: Forest surface soil samples were collected from five geographic locations at five time points, with paired environmental and meteorological data recorded Results: Bacterial Pielou's evenness differed significantly across sampling locations, but alpha diversity of neither bacteria nor fungi varied significantly within the observation window of this study. Permutational multivariate analysis of variance revealed that geographic location was strongly correlated with community structure variation, with no significant temporal effect within the 14-day observation window. Fungal communities exhibited a stronger distance-decay relationship, lower fit to neutral community models, and lower dispersal rate than bacterial communities, indicating stronger deterministic environmental selection. Both bacterial and fungal communities demonstrated exceptional potential for closed-set recognition of predefined sites (accuracy > 92%). Conclusion: Soil microbial community structure remains relatively stable over the study period, with spatial heterogeneity far exceeding temporal variability. In small-scale forest habitats with relatively stable vegetation, fungal communities exhibit stronger spatial heterogeneity than bacteria, a pattern likely driven by their high specificity for the co-varying host plants and elevation gradients across the sampling sites. However, inferences across different vegetation types and longer temporal scales require further validation.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.