A biogeographic map of soil bacterial communities in wheats field of the North China Plain

The vast diversity of soil bacteria provides essential ecosystem services that support agricultural production. Variation in the diversity and composition of soil biota may have predictive values for soil nutrient cycling and resilience of ecosystem services, thus providing valuable insights to improve food production. The North China Plain (NCP) is one of the world’s key agricultural regions, supplying more than 50% of the cereal consumed in Asia. However, it is unknown whether soil microbial diversity is predictable across the NCP. Using the MiSeq Illumina platform, we examined bacterial community variation in relation to spatial and environmental factors from 243 soils in wheat-maize double cropping rotation fields across the NCP, which cover nearly 0.3 million km 2 . Based on observed bacterial communities and their relationships with environmental factors, we generated a map of bacterial communities across the NCP. The highest bacterial diversity was found in the middle part of the NCP, with most of the variation in diversity attributable to differences in the community similarity of Actinobacteria and Alphaproteobacteria. These findings provide important baseline information for analyzing the relationships between microbial community, soil functionality and crop yields.