Environment of State Forestry Administration, The

Understanding biological diversity elevational pattern and the driver factors are indispensable to develop the ecological theories. Elevational gradient may mini-mize the impact of environmental factors and is the ideal places to study soil microbial elevational pat-terns. In this study, we selected four typical vegetation types from 1000 to 2800 m above the sea level on the northern slope of Shennongjia Mountain in central China, and analysed the soil bacterial community com-position, elevational patterns and the relationship between soil bacterial diversity and environmental factors by using the 16S rRNA Illumina sequencing and multivariate statistical analysis. The results revealed that the dominant bacterial phyla wer