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Despite many studies on the influence of cropping practices on soil microbial community structure, little is known about ecological patterns of rare and abundant microbial communities in response to different tobacco cropping systems. Here, using the high-throughput sequencing technique, we investigated the impacts of two different cropping systems on soil biochemical properties and the microbial community composition of abundant and rare taxa and its driving factors in continuous and rotational tobacco cropping systems in the mountain lands of Yunnan, China. Our results showed that distinct co-occurrence patterns and driving forces for abundant and rare taxa across the different cropping systems. The abundant taxa were mainly constrained by stochastic processes in both cropping systems. In contrast, rare taxa in continuous cropping fields were mainly influenced by environmental perturbation (cropping practice), while governed by deterministic processes under rotational cropping. The α-diversity indices of rare taxa tended to be higher than those of the abundant ones in the two cropping systems. Furthermore, the network topologies of rare taxa were more complex than those of the abundant taxa in the two cropping systems. These results highlight that rare taxa rather than abundant ones play important roles in maintaining ecosystem diversity and sustaining the stability of ecosystem functions, especially in continuous cropping systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]