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Quantifying human impact on Earth's microbiome

Nature Microbiology volume 1, Article number: 16145 (2016) Cite this article

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The global effect of human activities on Earth's microbiota has not yet been considered. Here, we identify potential trajectories of microbial change, and highlight knowledge gaps that need to be addressed to better understand how microbial communities across the globe will change in the future.

Human impact on natural and managed environments has arisen through displacement and transformation of Earth's abiotic and biotic resources. The scale of such impact varies from the organismal level, to ecosystems and globally. Identifying how these changes affect microbial communities has seldom been considered beyond the microhabitat scale, and microbiologists are only just beginning to identify global patterns in microbial diversity1. The effect of an increasingly managed environment on microbial communities and their ecosystem services therefore remains unclear for most biomes. Given that microorganisms comprise approximately one third of Earth's standing biomass and they perform the majority of biogeochemical transformations, we argue these issues should motivate research in microbial ecology.

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Figure 1: Global microbial change and knowledge gaps.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Applied Ecology New Zealand, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, 1010, New Zealand

    Stephen B. Pointing

  2. Institute of Nature and Environmental Technology, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, 920-1192, Japan

    Stephen B. Pointing

  3. Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309, Colorado, USA

    Noah Fierer

  4. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Colorado, Boulder, 80309, Colorado, USA

    Noah Fierer

  5. Program in Emerging Infectious Diseases, Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore, 169857, Singapore

    Gavin J. D. Smith

  6. WHO Collaborating Centre for Reference and Research on Influenza, Melbourne, 3000, Victoria, Australia

    Gavin J. D. Smith

  7. Duke Global Health Institute, Duke University, Durham, 27708, North Carolina, USA

    Gavin J. D. Smith

  8. Sydney Institute of Marine Science, Sydney, 2088, New South Wales, Australia

    Peter D. Steinberg

  9. University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, New South Wales, Australia

    Peter D. Steinberg

  10. Department of Food Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, 14853, New York, USA

    Martin Wiedmann

Authors
  1. Stephen B. Pointing
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  2. Noah Fierer
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  3. Gavin J. D. Smith
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  4. Peter D. Steinberg
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  5. Martin Wiedmann
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Correspondence to Stephen B. Pointing.

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Pointing, S., Fierer, N., Smith, G. et al. Quantifying human impact on Earth's microbiome. Nat Microbiol 1, 16145 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmicrobiol.2016.145

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