Forests are essential biomes for global biogeochemical cycles, and belowground microorganisms have a key role in providing relevant ecosystem services. To predict the effects of environmental changes on these ecosystem services requires a comprehensive understanding of how biotic and abiotic factors drive the composition of microbial communities in soil. However, microorganisms are not homogeneously distributed in complex environments such as soil, with different features affecting microbes at different extent depending on the niche they occupy. Indeed, this spatial heterogeneity hampers the extrapolation of microbial diversity study results from particular habitats to the ecosystem level, even if the resolution of the more recent studies has increased significantly after the standardization of high-throughput sequencing techniques. The present work intends to give a comprehensive view of the knowledge accumulated until date defining the more important drivers determining the structure of forest soil microbial communities from fine to continental scales.

Institute of Microbiology of the CAS Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology Prague Czech Republic

LEITAT Technological Center C de la Innovació 2 08225 Terrassa Spain

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Effect of plant communities on bacterial and fungal communities in a Central European grassland

Soil microbial communities following 20 years of fertilization and crop rotation practices in the Czech Republic