Background Microbial inhabitants of soils are important to ecosystem and planetary
functions, yet there are large gaps in our knowledge of their diversity and ecology. The
'Biomes of Australian Soil Environments'(BASE) project has generated a database of
microbial diversity with associated metadata across extensive environmental gradients at
continental scale. As the characterisation of microbes rapidly expands, the BASE database
provides an evolving platform for interrogating and integrating microbial diversity and …