Theories, Mechanisms and Patterns of Microbiome Species Coexistence in an Era of Climate Change

Abstract

Understanding the mechanisms of microbiome species coexistence is one of the major challenges confronted by microbiome ecologists today. Recent research largely advocates that the niche, biogeographic, and neutral/stochastic processes interactively determine the microbiome community composition across spatio-temporal scales in the ecosystem. However, current research is mainly exploratory and descriptive, and it is still difficult to link the observed microbiome species or functional trait diversity patterns to the ecosystem functioning on local, regional, and global scales. Similarly, whether and how climate and land-use changes impact the patterns of microbiome functional ecology remains to be studied. Moreover, little is known about how climate and land-use changes are linked to evolution or loss of microbial functional traits. Future research should nevertheless investigate the patterns of microbiome functional diversity across the velocity of climate and land-use changes, and attempt to integrate the patterns with functions in broader contexts of functional traits and community ecology.