Soil microbes play a key role in soil nutrient cycling, carbon storage, (plant) nutrient availability and biodiversity maintenance, among others. It is known that climatic factors, edaphic properties and plant communities influence soil microbial diversity and community composition. However, if we aim at incorporating soil microbial features into ecosystem models to improve their predictive capacity, a deeper understanding of the relationships between soil microorganisms, vegetation and soil properties is needed. In this context, elevational gradients have been recognized as useful “natural experiments” to assess the effect of a wide range of environmental factors on soil microbial communities since they are characterized by dramatic changes in climate and biotic characteristics over short geographic distances. In addition, the elevationally-defined vegetation belts on mountain slopes are counterparts to the latitudinally-controlled climatic zones and have been used to model climate change.

Previous surveys have shown that soil microbial diversity and abundance can follow hump-shaped, decreasing or U-shaped patterns with elevation. Temperature, precipitation, soil pH, nutrient amounts, carbon/nitrogen ratio and plant productivity have been identified as the drivers of these patterns. However, other works have shown that soil microbial diversity and structure do not follow any recognizable pattern with elevation. This points out the need of further studies, which should consider aspects such as seasonality, microbial network structure and the role of microbes in nutrient cycling, and vice versa, in relation to elevation.

Although a number of studies have found pronounced seasonal shifts in the features of soil microbial communities, there is a general lack of information on the effects of seasonality as a driver of temporal changes in community composition along elevational gradients. On the other hand, microorganisms form complex co-occurrence networks through direct or indirect interactions. The interactions among microorganisms may have a greater impact than environmental factors on community structure along elevational gradients. Under this context, network analysis can help us to shed light into the interactions among the members of a microbial community, as well as to identify its keystone members. Carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, as especially important soil macronutrients, are available in different forms along elevational gradients (i.e., chemical compositional differences in soil organic matter). They influence and are influenced by soil microbial communities. Consequently, their characterization and impact on the soil microbial community in relation with elevation are relevant for state-of-the-art ecological models.

The Research Topic "Soil microbes along elevational gradients: community structure, diversity and role in nutrient cycling" seeks to publish articles on:
• Archaea, bacteria, fungi, virus, protists, algae, etc. in terms of their mechanistic role, activity, abundance and/or taxonomic and functional diversity and composition along elevational gradients and their environmental drivers. Those works investigating more than one elevational gradient at the same or coupling the study of elevation and season will be considered as especially relevant.
• Microbial networks along elevational gradients. Association patterns and drivers of network complexity with elevation. Identification of keystone members of soil microbial communities at different elevations.
• Chemical composition of soil organic matter along elevational gradients through advanced analytical techniques (e.g., nuclear magnetic resonance, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy or pyrolysis) and its dependence on climate, vegetation and/or soil microbes.
• Decomposition of litter and/or deadwood along elevational gradients and the mediating microbes.
• Meta-analyses on previous soil microbiome works along elevational gradients and their driving factors.

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Frontiers in Microbiology

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