“…These include: a) phyla do not always demonstrate the same ecological behaviour between studies, for example Actinobacteria and Firmicutes have also been reported to have no relationship with C mineralisation ; b) specialised functions, such as lignin catabolism and denitrification, can be widely dispersed across phyla and so ecological coherence is function specific (Goldfarb et al, 2011;Schimel and Schaeffer, 2012); c) high levels of functional diversity can be present within a phylum, such as the Gamma, Alpha and Beta-Proteobacterial classes (Zhu et al, 2015); and d) our understanding of the distribution of functional traits related to C and nutrient turnover remains quite poor. This is evident from the recent discoveries of aerobic methane oxidation in Verrucomicrobia and the importance of aerobic ammonia oxidation by Archaea, which were functions historically thought specific to Proteobacteria (Dunfield et al, 2007;Prosser and Nicol, 2012), and non-photosynthetic Cyanobacteria (Soo et al, 2014).…”