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A critical question in microbial ecology is how the complex microbial communities are formed in natural ecosystems with the existence of thousands different species, thereby performing essential ecosystem functions and maintaining ecosystem stability. Previous studies disentangling the community assembly mechanisms mainly focus on microbial taxa, ignoring the functional traits they carry. By anchoring microbial functional traits and their carrying taxonomic groups involved in nitrogen cycling processes, this study demonstrated an important mechanism associated with the complex microbial community assembly. Evidence shows that the environment selects functional traits rather than taxonomic groups, and functional redundancy underlies stochastic taxonomic community assembly. This study is expected to provide valuable mechanistic insights into the complex microbial community assembly in both natural and artificial ecosystems.
Song et al. (Mon,) studied this question.