<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD Journal Publishing DTD v3.0 20080202//EN" "https://jats.nlm.nih.gov/nlm-dtd/publishing/3.0/journalpublishing3.dtd">
<article xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" article-type="data-paper" specific-use="SMUR" dtd-version="3.0" xml:lang="en">
<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">ESSDD</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>Earth System Science Data Discussions</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">ESSDD</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss.</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub">1866-3591</issn>
<publisher><publisher-name></publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/essd-2025-501</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A global database of soil microbial communities and associated climate, soil and vegetation factors</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Chen</surname>
<given-names>Shutao</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8513-1787</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Li</surname>
<given-names>Qi</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Hu</surname>
<given-names>Zhenghua</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5333-3798</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>School of Ecology and Applied Meteorology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>08</day>
<month>10</month>
<year>2025</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2025</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>38</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2025 Shutao Chen et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2025</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-501/">This article is available from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-501/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-501/essd-2025-501.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2025-501/essd-2025-501.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Few scholars have compiled databases of soil microbial communities and associated climate, soil and vegetation factors at the global scale. However, many studies involving high-throughput&amp;nbsp;sequencing of soil bacteria and fungi have been published in the past decade. In this study, we constructed a global database of the soil microbial communities and the associated climate, soil and vegetation factors, with sites on each of the seven continents and eleven ecosystem types. There were 8490 sets of soil bacterial and fungal community data for the different treatments and study sites in the database. Soil bacterial and fungal diversities were highly variable across various ecosystems. There was a highly significant (&lt;em&gt;R&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;2&lt;/sup&gt; = 0.4037, &lt;em&gt;P&lt;/em&gt; &amp;lt; 0.001) linear regression relationship between the fungal and bacterial Shannon indices. Proteobacteria and Ascomycota were the most species-rich bacterial and fungal phyla, respectively, in most ecosystems. The median relative abundances of Proteobacteria and Ascomycota were 29.30 % and 57.49 %, respectively. The information (e.g., site names and ecosystem types) in the database enabled researchers to investigate where the most abundant bacterial or fungal phylum was located and whether the ecosystem type affected bacterial and fungal diversities and compositions at the global scale. We anticipated that this database could be further improved by adding more detailed information, such as bacterial and fungal compositions at the class, order, family, and genus levels. The database was available via Zenodo at &lt;a href=&quot;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16195889&quot;&gt;https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16195889&lt;/a&gt; (Chen et al., 2025).</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="38"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Natural Science Foundation of China</funding-source>
<award-id>42375114</award-id>
<award-id>41775151</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
</front>
<body/>
<back>
</back>
</article>