The current status and potential research directions of soil microbial carbon in bamboo forest

•The incomplete or biased descriptions of microbial communities.•The incomplete or biased descriptions of different microbial communities with uneven attention paid to different microbes.•The lack of quantitative data, which can resolve the spatio-temporal scales of the studied phenomena.•The challenges in identifying active microorganisms and their functions.•The widely varying levels of exploration of individual habitats and biomes.•The dearth of studies on whole ecosystems.