DOI: 10.5061/dryad.z08kprrk8
title: Biocrust environmental data across Chinese deserts

description: 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 impact of the species pool on community β-diversity varied across
 microbial groups, with soil total bacteria and diazotrophs being
 significantly influenced. While the contributions of specific assembly
 processes to community β-diversity patterns varied among different
 microbial groups, significant effects of local community assembly
 processes on β-diversity patterns were consistently observed across all
 groups. Homogenous selection and dispersal limitation emerged as crucial
 processes for all groups. Precipitation and soil C:P were the key factors
 mediating β-diversity for all groups. This study has substantially
 advanced our understanding of how the communities of multiple microbial
 groups are structured in desert biocrust systems.
description: 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".
description: # 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 barcode id of amplicon sequencing; * "Sites"&""Sites1" = The name of sampling sites, that is, the name of the Deserts; * "Shrub" = Between or under shrub cover; * "Stage" = Biocrust successional stages; * "Long" &"Lat" = Geographical information of each sample; * "Altitude" = Height above sea level * "Profile" & "Profile1" = Biocrust or sub soil sample * "Replicates" = five replicates for each treatment * "MAT" = Mean annual temperature (°C) * "MAP" = Mean annual precipitation (mm)、 * "pH" = Soil pH (m/v = 2:5) * "TOC","TN","TP"&"AP" = Soil total organic C (%), total N (g kg-1), total P(g kg-1) and available P(mg kg-1)\ * "Cnratio" and "Cpratio" = TOC to TN and TOC to TP ratio, both are unitless ## Sharing/Access information The amplicon sequence data of bacteria, fungi, diazotrophs and phoD-harbouring taxa associated with this dataset are available now at National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), Sequence Read Archive (SRA) with the project number of PRJNA1010136.