As far as auspicious beginnings go, listening to dozens of tropical birds share news in a blooming city park while watching the rising sun peek out of the clouds leftover from a pre-dawn rain, the city traffic a distant hum under the nearby laughter of morning walkers watching their dogs frolic, is a heck of a way to begin a week-long conference on microbes and global health. Microbes feed the planet by interfacing between geological processes and biological ones: single-celled microbes take basic elements up to complex chemical compounds and back down again to the basics, all of which allows more complex forms of life to access the chemicals they need. Microbes help provide critical nutrients to the plants in this park, they help the parrots digest their food, they can even act as the physical seeds around which molecules of water gather into drops to create rain.
The International Society of Microbial Ecology hosts their major scientific conference every two years in rotating locations around the world, this year in Auckland, New Zealand. While every flavor of microbiology can be found here at the conference, there are always themes of building a collective and reducing the negative impacts of human activities while amplifying the positive ones. For example, there were presentations about the detriment of clearcutting for mono-cropping of commodities, as well as presentations on how migratory grazing of domesticated livestock creates biodiversity hotspots in grasslands due to manure and urine nutrients as well as turnover of plants (grazing allows for competition from other plants but also germinates seeds that need to pass through a digestive tract). In short, the way we live our lives and interact with the planet affects the microbes we interact with and the ones we leave behind, and when we do this intentionally and with mutual benefit in mind, everything can flourish.
Yet, deciding on that course of action is not necessarily without logistical burdens: what should we change, and what will be the outcome? Do the benefits outweigh the problems that will occur? How do we prioritize land use decisions when some people think the destruction of air, water, soil, plants, animals, and people caused by data centers is worth it to support mass surveillance of the public? Thus, the process of making policy decisions or design choices which intentionally support microbial communities for the benefit of environments, organisms, and renewing natural resources can be arduous: between sparse information about remote microbes, to getting people to agree on the value of nature, to enacting change across borders, it is understandable that the pace of innovation crawls in comparison to the swiftness of changes to our world and the urgency to save ourselves while we can (microbes and other life on this planet will survive the consequences our actions even if we don’t). Worthwhile endeavors are neither quick nor cheap, and if we can focus for decades on making space travel and inhabitation viable, then surely the collective intelligence of humanity can figure out how to terraform without destroying the very ground beneath our feet.
My goals were triple-fold at the ISME conference: to learn about cutting-edge research, to widen and strengthen my network of colleagues, and to make progress on spreading awareness of and setting priorities for the Ethics, Conservation and Management Planning Working Group of the new Microbial Conservation Specialist Group of the IUCN Species Survival Commission (IUCN SSC MCSG ECMP). Some of the leadership team of that group was in Auckland, and we took the opportunity to meet about setting priorities over the next year.
Additionally,, I initiated conversations about the group to invite researchers who are already working in this conceptual space, which was incredibly easy at the ISME conference because everyone here has some connection to sustainability, conservation, stewardship, equitable collaborations, and sharing of research outcomes. In particular, the session on “Indigenous Knowledge – solutions for global environmental changes” featured speakers who were all focused on protecting microbial communities and the unique ecosystems that host them, as well as trying to prevent the bioprospecting from and exclusion of local (and especially Indigenous, see most of recorded modern history for examples) peoples that occurred during the ‘gold rush’ early years of microbial ecology, ecology, conservation, anthropology – actually pretty much most fields were used as an excuse to pillage. One audience member of that session told the story of how, after the first papers describing novel microbes in delicate and uncatalogued ecosystems in Argentina were published, researchers from other countries flooded to the area to study and collect them, often actively destroying ecosystems in the process by driving on the very microbial mats they had come to study.
With a complicated legacy to remediate and learn from, conservation must be united with ethics, and thus the ECMP subgroup is tasked with learning from history, promoting equitable practices already being used around the globe, and trying to enact these best practices into education and policy to move us into a better way of treating each other and planet.
Learn more about the Ethics Subgroup and the Microbial Special Group
Please visit the MCSG website for more information, and if you are at ISME20, reach visit the Applied Microbiology International publications display table to learn more and join an information session.
Gilbert, J., Scholz, A., Dominguez-Bello, M.G., Korsten, L., Berg, G., Singh, B., Boetius, A., Wang, F., Greening, C., Wrighton, K., Bordenstein, S., Jansson, J., Lennon, J., Souza, V., Allard, S.M., Thomas, T., Cowan, D., Crowther, T., Nguyen, N., Harper, L., Haraoui, L-P., Ishaq, S., McFall-Ngai, M., Redford, K.H., Peixoto, R. 2025. Safeguarding Microbial Biodiversity: Microbial Conservation Specialist Group (MCSG) within the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Editorial Published in multiple journals simultaneously, including mSystems, Sustainable Microbiology, the ISME Journal, and FEMS Microbial Ecology.
Gilbert, J., Peixoto, R., Scholz, A., Dominguez-Bello, M.G., Korsten, L., Berg, G., Singh, B., Boetius, A., Wang, F., Greening, C., Wrighton, K., Bordenstein, S., Jansson, J., Lennon, J., Souza, V., Thomas, T., Cowan, D., Crowther, T., Nguyen, N., Harper, L., Haraoui, L-P., Ishaq, S., Redford, K. 2025. Launching the IUCN Microbial Conservation Specialist Group as a global safeguard for microbial biodiversity. Nature Microbiology 10:2359–2360. (correspondence)
The Ishaq Lab 