Over the last two decades, a considerable effort has been made to decipher the biogeography of soil microbial communities as a whole, from small to broad scales. In contrast, few studies have focused on the taxonomic groups constituting these communities; thus, our knowledge of their ecological attributes and the drivers determining their composition and distribution is limited. We applied a pyrosequencing approach targeting 16S ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes in soil DNA to a set of 2173 soil samples from France to reach a comprehensive understanding of the spatial distribution of bacteria and archaea and to identify the ecological processes and environmental drivers involved. Taxonomic assignment of the soil 16S rRNA sequences indicated the presence of 32 bacterial phyla or subphyla and 3 archaeal phyla. Twenty of these 35 phyla were cosmopolitan and abundant, with heterogeneous spatial distributions structured in patches ranging from a 43- to 260-km radius. The hierarchy of the main environmental drivers of phyla distribution was soil pH > land management > soil texture > soil nutrients > climate. At a lower taxonomic level, 47 dominant genera belonging to 12 phyla aggregated 62.1% of the sequences. We also showed that the phylum-level distribution can be determined largely by the distribution of the dominant genus or, alternatively, reflect the combined distribution of all of the phylum members. Together, our study demonstrated that soil bacteria and archaea present highly diverse biogeographical patterns on a nationwide scale and that studies based on intensive and systematic sampling on a wide spatial scale provide a promising contribution for elucidating soil biodiversity determinism.

中文翻译：

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法国各地土壤细菌和古细菌的生物地理学。

在过去的二十年中，人们做出了巨大的努力来从小到大地解读整个土壤微生物群落的生物地理。相反，很少有研究集中在构成这些群落的生物分类群上。因此，我们对它们的生态属性以及决定其组成和分布的驱动因素的了解是有限的。我们对来自法国的2173个土壤样品应用了针对土壤DNA中16 S核糖体RNA（rRNA）基因的焦磷酸测序方法，以全面了解细菌和古细菌的空间分布，并确定涉及的生态过程和环境驱动因素。土壤的分类分配16 SrRNA序列指示存在32个细菌门或亚门和3个古细菌门。这35个门中的20个是世界性的，并且丰富，具有分布在43-260 km半径范围内的斑块结构的异质空间分布。菌群分布的主要环境驱动因素是土壤pH值>土地管理>土壤质地>土壤养分>气候。在较低的分类学水平上，属于12个门的47个显性属合计了62.1％的序列。我们还表明，门类分布可以很大程度上由优势属的分布决定，或者可以反映所有门类成员的组合分布。一起，