Table 1. Results of PERMANOVA testing of the influence of the factors underlying Au deposit, soil horizon, landform and lithology on microbial communities and geochemical parameters at the study sites.

Community structure	Bacteria (√) CVf	Pseudo-F	P	Fungi (√) CV	Pseudo-F	P	Archaea (√) CV	Pseudo-F	P	Geochemistry (√) CV	Pseudo-F	P
Old Pirate
underlying D	5.1g	1.5	0.09	6.5	1.3	0.1	−10.65	0.2	1.0	2.47	2.6	0.04
RL	8.0	2.6	0.0002	7.2	1.5	0.05	12.27	2.3	0.01	2.67	3.1	0.008
D × RLa	7.4	1.9	0.02	8.9	1.7	0.004	9.36	1.7	0.04	3.03	3.6	0.0006
Residual	23.1			39.2			40.49			6.93
Tomakin
Underlying D	18.5	4.6	0.0001	11.6	5.6	0.0001	10.8	1.6	0.04	3.67	7.3	0.0001
SH	13.6	2.9	0.0001	2.9	1.3	0.2	−2.7	1.0	0.5	3.01	5.2	0.002
D × SHb	7.8	1.3	0.07	−2.5	0.9	0.5	−11.4	0.7	0.9	2.45	2.4	0.06
Residual	41.7			23.3			59.9			6.31
Wildcat/Humpback
Underlying D	−7.8	0.7	0.8	5.0	1.5	0.09	24.5	1.6	0.2	2.54	2.8	0.03
L	10.6	1.8	0.03	15.8	3.8	0.0001	3.5	1.1	0.4	5.21	14.0	0.0001
RL	9.7	1.3	0.07	7.0	1.3	0.05	18.0	1.6	0.07	1.69	1.6	0.08
D × Lc	5.7	1.1	0.4	4.0	1.1	0.4	10.3	1.0	0.5	1.41	1.2	0.3
D × RL	−11.0	0.7	0.9	4.3	1.1	0.3	12.5	1.2	0.3	1.23	1.2	0.3
L × RLd	3.3	1.0	0.4	11.0	1.2	0.1	23.4	1.4	0.1	2.49	6.2	0.07
D × L × RLe	−19.5	0.6	0.9	−14.3	0.8	0.7	Undetermined			1.40	1.1	0.3
Residual	42.4			40.0			54.7			5.65

Abbreviations: D, deposit; L, lithology ; PERMANOVA, permutational multivariate analysis of variance; RL, regolith landform; SH, soil horizon.

^aInteractive effect of underlying D and RL.

^bInteractive effect of underlying D and SH.

^cInteractive effect of underlying D and L.

^dInteractive effect of L and RL.

^eInteractive effect of underlying D, L and RL.

^f(√)CV is the square root of the component of variation, which is a data set dependent measure of the effect of size in units of the community dissimilarities (that is, increasing positive values); negative values indicate zero components (Anderson et al., 2008).

^gSignificance level to assess the criteria was P<0.1 (in bold).