Abstract:To understand the spatial pattern of soil microbial communities at the phyla level in Mulun National Natural Reserve in Huangjiang of Guangxi, we used geostatistical modeling and Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA genes to the soils in a 25 hm2 karst evergreen deciduous broadleaf forest. The results showed that the dominant bacterial phyla in the karst forest soils were Protebacteria(34.5%), Actinobacteria(30.7%) and Acidobacteria(12.2%). Soil bacterial taxa showed spatial dependence with an autocorrelation range of 44.4-841.4 m, and most of them were within the scope of the study plot(500 m). An increasing trend was observed for Proteobacteria from north to south in the studied area, but an opposite trend for Actinobacteria and Firmicutes was observed. The spatial pattern for Chloroflexi, Acidobacteira, Thaumarchaeota, Bacteroidetes, Gemmatimonadetes and Verrucomicrobia could be characterized as patchy, and the spatial pattern for Nitrospirae could be unimodal. In addition, the spatial pattern for Latescibacteria could be intermittent with low and high value strips. Overall, our results demonstrated that the spatial distribution of soil microbial communities differs among various taxa in karst forest.