The Ocean Microbiome on a Changing Planet
The new editorial by Ramiro Logares, “The ocean microbiome on a changing planet” (July 2025) sets the stage for Ocean Microbiology – an open-access journal devoted to advancing our understanding of marine and aquatic microorganisms.
Marine microbes are the architects of Earth’s biogeochemical cycles: they feed the base of food webs, regulate carbon and nutrient fluxes, and help buffer the climate system. Yet, despite breakthroughs in DNA sequencing, imaging, single-cell tools, and autonomous sensors, much of their biology remains terra incognita.
The editorial argues that we now face a pivotal moment. With climate change, ocean warming, acidification, pollution, and habitat disruption accelerating, we must not only catalog microbial diversity – but also understand how communities shift, adapt, break down, or collapse under stress.
Logares calls for long-term observatories, predictive modeling, and integration across scales – from genes to ecosystems – to interrogate resilience, resistance, and tipping points in the microbial realm.
As the UN’s Decade of Ocean Science (2021–2030) reaches the midway, this call is timely: the future of the ocean – and of the biosphere – depends in part on what happens at the microbial level. Ocean Microbiology invites researchers to explore microbial diversity, host–microbe interactions, metabolic innovation, global change biology, and applied “blue biotechnology”.