Fig. 1: Maps showing the sampling points of yak fecal samples collected during this research.

a An overview of the sampling points in four provinces of Chinese Mainland, with five distinct sampling points indicated by blue dots. b A detailed topographic map of the five sampling points, with the scale and corresponding elevation of different locations displayed on the right side of the figure. The source of the map is Geospatial Data Cloud (https://www.gscloud.cn), and the software used to create the map is ArcMap v10.5. All of these data are freely available to the public. c An elevation profile graph of the sampling points. d The scatter plot depicts the quantities of reads and contigs identified as viruses, produced by each individual library. e The light blue portion in both pie charts represents the reads (on the left) or contigs (on the right) annotated as viruses in all libraries. The light pink portion represents reads or contigs annotated as non-viral or unannotated. f The larger figure represents the species rarefaction curve plotted using Megan6 software, with a logarithmic scale transformation applied; The smaller figure depicts the species accumulation curve, where the horizontal axis represents the number of randomly sampled libraries, and the vertical axis represents the cumulative number of identified viral species. g An UpSet plot based on different sampling points as the classification criterion. This plot showcases the number of viruses shared or unique among different populations of yaks’ gut. The left-side bar chart represents the total number of viral species for each sampling point, while the top bar chart represents the number of viral phyla corresponding to shared or unique viruses.