Unraveling the drivers controlling community assembly is a central issue in ecology. Although it is generally accepted that selection, dispersal, diversification and drift are major community assembly processes, defining their relative importance is very challenging. Here, we present a framework to quantitatively infer community assembly mechanisms by phylogenetic bin-based null model analysis (iCAMP). iCAMP shows high accuracy (0.93–0.99), precision (0.80–0.94), sensitivity (0.82–0.94), and specificity (0.95–0.98) on simulated communities, which are 10–160% higher than those from the entire community-based approach. Application of iCAMP to grassland microbial communities in response to experimental warming reveals dominant roles of homogeneous selection (38%) and ‘drift’ (59%). Interestingly, warming decreases ‘drift’ over time, and enhances homogeneous selection which is primarily imposed on Bacillales. In addition, homogeneous selection has higher correlations with drought and plant productivity under warming than control. iCAMP provides an effective and robust tool to quantify microbial assembly processes, and should also be useful for plant and animal ecology.

解开控制群落组装的驱动因素是生态学的一个中心问题。尽管人们普遍认为选择、分散、多样化和漂移是主要的群落组装过程，但定义它们的相对重要性非常具有挑战性。在这里，我们提出了一个框架，通过基于系统发育箱的空模型分析（iCAMP）来定量推断群落组装机制。 iCAMP 在模拟社区上表现出较高的准确度 (0.93–0.99)、精密度 (0.80–0.94)、敏感性 (0.82–0.94) 和特异性 (0.95–0.98)，比基于整个社区的结果高 10–160%方法。将 iCAMP 应用于草原微生物群落以响应实验性变暖，揭示了同质选择 (38%) 和“漂移”(59%) 的主导作用。有趣的是，随着时间的推移，变暖会减少“漂移”，并增强主要针对芽胞杆菌的同质选择。此外，同质选择与变暖条件下的干旱和植物生产力的相关性高于对照。 iCAMP 提供了一种有效且强大的工具来量化微生物组装过程，并且对于植物和动物生态学也应该有用。