Abstract
In the permafrost region of northeastern China, vegetation and soil environment have showed response to permafrost degradation triggered by global warming, but the corresponding variation of the soil microbial communities remains poorly investigated. Here, a field investigation in the continuous permafrost region was conducted to collect 63 soil samples from 21 sites along a latitudinal gradient to assess the distribution pattern of microbial communities and their correlation with environmental factors. High-throughput Illumina sequencing revealed that bacterial communities were dominated by Proteobacteria, Acidobacteria, Bacteroidetes and Actinobacteria. Both microbial richness and phylogenetic diversity decreased initially and then increased as the latitude increased. UniFrac analysis of microbial communities detected significant differences among latitudes. Variation partitioning analysis and structural equation models revealed that environmental variables, including geographic factors, plant-community factors and soil physicochemical factors, all played non-negligible roles in affecting the microbial community structures directly or indirectly. Redundancy analysis and boosted regression tree analysis further highlighted the influences of soil pH and plant richness on microbial community compositions and diversity patterns. Taken together, these results suggest that the distribution pattern of soil microbial communities shows distinct changes along the latitudinal gradients in northeastern China and is predominantly mediated by soil pH and plant diversity.