Microbial Biogeography in Global Oceanic Systems

A special issue of Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (ISSN 2077-1312). This special issue belongs to the section "Marine Ecology".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 May 2025) | Viewed by 388

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
NOAA, Global Ocean Monitoring and Observing, Silver Spring, MD, USA
Interests: environmental microbiology; microbial ecology; biological oceanography; bioinformatics; evolutionary genomics; biogeochemistry

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in characterizing the biogeography of the microbial community present in the surface ocean. Major oceanographic campaigns and distributed time series locations have revealed systematic patterns of microbial biodiversity and seasonal oscillations of community composition that are strongly associated with environmental conditions and unique ocean biomes or seascapes. However, significant spatiotemporal observational gaps still exist, such as the mesopelagic and deep, the Indian and Western Pacific, and sub-polar and/or winter conditions. Moreover, our understanding of the relationship between microbiome diversity, metabolism, and the function of the ecosystem is nascent. Further work is needed to quantify microbial community traits and their impact on marine biogeochemical rates and fluxes. In order to enhance the prediction of ocean biogeochemistry trends, establishing the global ocean baselines of microbial biodiversity and functional biogeography as well as elucidating the mechanistic properties of microbial communities that influence system-level processes is critical.

Dr. Alyse Larkin
Guest Editor

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Keywords

  • microbial biogeography
  • microbiome function
  • genomic traits
  • microbial metabolism
  • global oceans
  • ocean biomes and seascapes
  • biological oceanography
  • ecosystem processes
  • biogeochemistry
  • biochemical rates and fluxes

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

15 pages, 2126 KiB  
Article
Dynamics of Microbial Abundance in Unvegetated and Seagrass Habitats: A Case Study
by Madeline Olivia, Patrichka Wei-Yi Chen, Clara Natalie Annabel, Wen-Chen Chou, Jian-Jhih Chen, Vladimir Mukhanov, Chien-Fu Chao and An-Yi Tsai
J. Mar. Sci. Eng. 2025, 13(6), 1048; https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse13061048 - 26 May 2025
Viewed by 37
Abstract
Seagrass meadows are recognized for their ecological importance, yet their influence on microbial community structure remains insufficiently characterized. This study examined the effects of seagrass presence on microbial assemblages in a subtropical coastal environment by comparing seagrass habitats to adjacent unvegetated sediments. Microbial [...] Read more.
Seagrass meadows are recognized for their ecological importance, yet their influence on microbial community structure remains insufficiently characterized. This study examined the effects of seagrass presence on microbial assemblages in a subtropical coastal environment by comparing seagrass habitats to adjacent unvegetated sediments. Microbial abundances, including viruses, bacteria, picophytoplankton (Synechococcus spp. and picoeukaryotes), and heterotrophic nanoflagellates, were quantified using flow cytometry. Viral concentrations were significantly higher in seagrass treatments (2.4–9.2 × 106 viruses mL−1) than in controls (0.6–2.0 × 106 viruses mL−1), while bacterial abundances were slightly lower in seagrass treatments (5.1–16.0 × 105 cells mL−1) than in controls (7.9–16.6 × 105 cells mL−1). As a result, the virus-to-bacteria ratio (VBR) was significantly elevated in seagrass habitats, suggesting enhanced viral regulation of bacterial populations. Additionally, picophytoplankton and heterotrophic nanoflagellates increased in seagrass incubations, with strong correlations indicating that nanoflagellates are likely major grazers of picophytoplankton. These results highlight the role of seagrass habitats in modulating microbial interactions and emphasize the need to consider habitat-specific characteristics when evaluating microbial dynamics and biogeochemical processes in coastal systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Microbial Biogeography in Global Oceanic Systems)
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