Microbiome rescue: directing resilience of environmental microbial communities

Abstract

Earth's climate crisis threatens to disrupt ecosystem services and destabilize food security. Microbiome management will be a crucial component of a comprehensive strategy to maintain stable microbinal functions for ecosystems and plants in the face of climate change. Microbiome rescue is the directed, community-level recovery of microbial populations and functions lost after an environmental disturbance. Microbiome rescue aims to propel a resilience trajectory for community functions. Rescue can be achieved via demographic, functional, adaptive, or evolutionary recovery of disturbance-sensitive populations. Various ecological mechanisms support rescue, including dispersal, reactivation from dormancy, functional redundancy, plasticity, and diversification, and these mechanisms can interact. Notably, controlling microbial reactivation from dormancy is a potentially fruitful but underexplored target for rescue.