The large efforts to document and map aboveground biodiversity have helped to elucidate ecological and evolutionary mechanisms and processes, predict responses to global change, and identify potential management options in response to those changes. Yet these concepts have mostly been applied to aboveground plant and animal communities, while microbial diversity remains difficult to incorporate. High-throughput DNA sequencing methods provides unprecedented opportunities to further unravel microbial ecology and its worldwide role from human health to ecosystem functioning. In this presentation I will highlight how we can begin to link microbial data to the already well-established macro-knowledge and other environmental databases.
