The connections of climate change with microbial ecology and their consequences for ecosystem, human, and plant health

Abstract

The climate crisis presents an urgent challenge for Earth's living creatures and the habitats in which they have been adapted to thrive. Climate-related stress presents risks to microorganisms, the stability of the functions they provide, and their maintenance of beneficial interactions with their hosts and ecosystems. Microbes move across the continuum of anthropogenic influence on Earth's ecosystems, from pristine to human-managed to fully urbanized environments. Because microbial feedback within and across this continuum exists at multiple, connected scales from molecules to ecosystem-level processes, predicting microbial responses to climate stress and their potentially wide-ranging consequences remains difficult. Here, we discuss the broad implications of microbial and microbiome responses to climate change as they interface with human, plant, and ecosystem health. For each section on human, plant and ecosystem health, we briefly discuss the state of knowledge for each and follow with proposed future research, including some directions that are promising but require more work to evaluate. We end by considering overarching microbial ecology research needs across these systems and microbial solutions under investigation as possible climate-resilient interventions to maintain human, plant, and ecosystem health. This work draws on diverse expertise to identify broad research directions across typically separated disciplines and builds a holistic framework for considering their interrelationships.

Keywords: One Health; Sustainable Development Goals; agriculture; antibiotic resistance; biogeochemical cycles; greenhouse gas; opportunistic pathogens; phytopathogen; plant microbiota; soil microbiota; vector-borne pathogens.