Abstract
Microbial observation is of high relevance in assessing marine phenomena of scientific and societal concern including ocean productivity, harmful algal blooms, and pathogen exposure. However, we have yet to realise its potential to coherently and comprehensively report on global ocean status. The ability of satellites to monitor the distribution of phytoplankton has transformed our appreciation of microbes as the foundation of key ecosystem services; however, more in-depth understanding of microbial dynamics is needed to fully assess natural and anthropogenically induced variation in ocean ecosystems. While this first synthesis shows that notable efforts exist, vast regions such as the ocean depths, the open ocean, the polar oceans, and most of the Southern Hemisphere lack consistent observation. To secure a coordinated future for a global microbial observing system, existing long-term efforts must be better networked to generate shared bioindicators of the Global Ocean's state and health.
Highlights
Despite decades of effort, the oceans remain strongly undersampled in space, hampering the estimation of global element fluxes and assessments of the diversity and distribution of marine life
Distributed ocean time series are key to the detection and quantification of ecosystem change, and for assessing anthropogenic impacts across decadal time scales
These efforts are rare in the marine realm, do not follow concerted international strategies, and typically do not measure biological phenomena in the deep
Summary
The oceans remain strongly undersampled in space, hampering the estimation of global element fluxes and assessments of the diversity and distribution of marine life. And functionally diverse microbial assemblages from all three domains of life, along with their viruses, are the primary contributors to ocean productivity, biomass, and diversity They are the core drivers of ocean biogeochemical cycles, control the emission of radiatively active gases, and constitute the foundations of many marine ecosystem services. These essential marine microbes respond to both natural and anthropogenic stressors; assessing how responses on the population and community level will contribute to ecosystem functions remains a challenging research target [8] Pioneering studies, such as the TARA Oceans expedition [9] and Ocean Sampling Day (OSD; [10]), have shown that the large-scale assessment of microbiome variations in space can be achieved when sampling, sequencing, and data flows are thoroughly coordinated. These results are almost certainly incomplete, underscoring the need for the microbial observatory community to create a central registry to better align our collective efforts
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