“…Conversely, breaking down broader taxa into finer units may result in more noise than information, as the distributions and abundances of those ecologically equivalent units exhibit a high degree of randomness caused by neutral-stochastic processes instead of nichedeterministic processes (Lozupone et al, 2012;Prosser, 2012;DeLong, 2014). Actually, previous studies have indicated that despite the considerable variability in species-level composition, prokaryotic communities in a given habitat usually have stable phylum-level composition as well as similar functional attributes (Fierer et al, 2007;Lauber et al, 2009;Burke et al, 2011;Fan et al, 2012;Lozupone et al, 2012); these findings further support the view that there is ecological coherence in deep prokaryotic branches (Philippot et al, 2009(Philippot et al, , 2010) and potentially many fine-level taxa are functionally redundant and fulfill the same ecological role (Lozupone et al, 2012;Prosser, 2012;DeLong, 2014).…”