SSC Conference to Bring Together Conservation and Microbial Research Communities

Research interest in microbes and microbiomes has exploded. Each new discovery reinforces the importance of microbes in everything from human health, food production, global nutrient cycles, greenhouse gas exchange, and disease dynamics. Yet global assessments of biodiversity pay scant attention to microbes. Policy instruments largely ignore them, and conservation organizations have proven almost completely uninterested in extending their work to address microbes even though they face the same set of threats as the rest of biodiversity

An understandable oversight, perhaps, as most microbes are invisible to humans. Moreover, most people consider the microbial world to be the province only of doctors and public health professionals despite the fact that 99.9% of microbes are not clinically relevant. 

Microbes are highly diverse—with upward of 1 trillion strains by some estimates—and they are also ubiquitous. All ecosystems on planet Earth are rich with microbes, from soils, lakes, rivers, sediments, the ocean, and atmosphere, and all the plants and animals therein. Bacteria are estimated to account for approximately 70 percent of marine biomass and are critical in marine nutrient cycling, as they are in all other ecosystems. Even tiny viruses globally have a biomass of 0.2 Gt C, representing 10 percent of the biomass of all animals. 

Expanding Conservation to Include Microbes

The upcoming conference, Conservation in a Microbial World,  will explore how the conservation community can expand its attention to include the rich, dynamic, and vital microbial world that is such a key part of biodiversity, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, archaea, and protozoa.  SSC helped organize the conference and SSC participants include Chair Jon Paul Rodriguez, SSC Steering Committee Member Axel Hochkirch,  and Greg Mueller, Chair of the IUCN SSC Fungal Conservation Committee. Other conference organizers include The University of California San Diego, Scripps Institute of Oceanography, and the J. Craig Venter Institute, with support from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

Conservation practice should extend its duty to care to the microbial world because of both intrinsic and instrumental values. Microbes have value in their own right, as part of microbial communities, and as part of coupled systems with other non-microbial species. They have instrumental values as providers of services or contributions to all three components of biodiversity: genes, species, and ecosystems. They provide critical services to humans through food, physiology, climate, and nutrient cycling. While the majority of research has focused on the human microbiome, the microbial communities associated with animals, fungi, and plants have also been extensively explored, and we are now aware of many essential interactions between microbes and their hosts that if absent would cause substantial hardship or even extinction risk for the host.

Yet, talk of microbes inevitably runs into the deeply rooted human antipathy to “germs,” even though of the trillion or so types of microorganisms only about 1,400 cause infectious disease in humans. The recent COVID epidemic has heightened the view by many publics that microbes equal disease. 

Consideration of applying conservation to the microbial world faces a substantial public relations challenge. Yet it is essential given that the microbial world is facing the same set of threats as the rest of biodiversity including extinction, land use change, pollution of lands and waters, ocean warming and acidification, invasive species, and “co-extinction” driven by loss of host species. 

Potential Role of a Microbe Specialist Group

One potential route to build the capacity and interest of the global conservation community in the microbial world would be the establishment of a SSC Microbe Specialist Group. Through the work of such a group the 1,500 Member institutions of IUCN and more than 10,500 expert members of SSC would learn more about the importance of the microbial world to conservation, what work should be done, and why. This conference is a first step toward establishing such a group.

The conference will also increase awareness of how specialists in the microbial world can extend their work addressing pressing conservation problems through contacts made at the meeting and subsequent publications. Finally, the conference organizers hope it will generate key examples of how microbe-aware conservation strategies would significantly improve existing conservation and restoration action globally.