From chloroflexi to climate: Considering microbial services at regional-to-global scales

Microbial contributions to emergent ecosystem services have long been recognized, and are shaped by environmental drivers that vary across space and through time. The scale at which microbial communities can be measured, however, suffers from a fundamental mismatch with the scales of projections we would like to inform. From a microbial perspective, the infinitely coarse resolution of land models precludes a detailed consideration of particular community composition or gene expression. Instead, we need to distill the firehose of microbial insight into broad functional characterizations, with a special attention to understanding how those functional attributes respond to environmental perturbations.