“…Comparing these communities to other desert communities, we see that with only a few exceptions, namely the Negev Desert and the Atacama Desert (Bell, ; Connon, Lester, Shafaat, Obenhuber, & Ponce, ; Crits‐Christoph et al., ; Friedmann, Lipkin, & Ocampo‐Paus, ; Wierzchos et al., ), the microbial diversity is quite similar (Antony et al., ; Bell, Athey, & Sommerfeld, ; de la Torre et al., ; Friedmann, ; Lacap‐Bugler et al., ). In comparison with the community structure of local desert soils, we find that the overall structure is comparable, with Cyanobacteria and Proteobacteria numbers being higher on a relative basis (Garcia‐Pichel, Johnson, Youngkin, & Belnap, ; Garcia‐Pichel, Lopez‐Cortes, & Nubel, ; Lee et al., ).…”