The processes governing soil bacteria biogeography are still not fully understood. It remains unknown how the importance of environmental filtering and dispersal differs between bacterial taxonomic and functional biogeography, and whether their importance is scale‐dependent. We sampled soils across the Tibet plateau, with distances among plots ranging from 20 m to 1550 km. Taxonomic composition of bacterial community was chara...

Aim Support for different underlying mechanisms of species occupancy is inconsistent, yet this could be related to spatial scale. Since abiotic filtering typically acts at broader scales than biotic interactions, we hypothesise that occupancy could be more driven by species' abiotic niche (i.e. tolerance and preference of abiotic conditions) at broad scales, whereas species' traits affecting competitive ability could be more i...

Summary Protists are abundant and play key trophic functions in soil. Documenting how their trophic contributions vary across large environmental gradients is essential to understand and predict how biogeochemical cycles will be impacted by global changes. Here, using amplicon sequencing of environmental DNA in open habitat soil from 161 locations spanning 2600 m of elevation in the Swiss Alps (from 400 to 3000 m), we found th...

Assessing the degree to which climate explains the spatial distributions of different taxonomic and functional groups is essential for anticipating the effects of climate change on ecosystems. Most effort so far has focused on above‐ground organisms, which offer only a partial view on the response of biodiversity to environmental gradients. Here including both above‐ and below‐ground organisms, we quantified the degree of topo...

Issue Approaches to predicting species assemblages through stacking individual niche‐based species distribution models (S‐SDMs) need to account for community processes other than abiotic filtering. Such constraints have been introduced by implementing ecological assembly rules (EARs) into S‐SDMs, and can be based on patterns of functional traits in communities. Despite being logically valid, this approach has led to a limited...

Aim Biotic interactions have a central role in defining species assemblages, realized both through negative and positive impacts. However, forecasts of how these interactions affect biodiversity across landscapes are challenging (and lacking) because the outcome of interactions depends not only on the identity of the interacting species but also on local environmental conditions. Thus, we study how biotic interactions manifest...