Spatial and temporal changes in environmental conditions over billions of years have driven the evolution of diverse microbial, fungal and plant species that have shaped the ecosystems, atmosphere and climate of our Earth system. Understanding the function and resilience of organisms and our biomes in response to climatic change and their complex feedbacks requires knowledge of its component parts and their interactions. Technological innovations in the measurement and interpretation of expansive and detailed ‘meta-omics’ datasets are poised to reveal mechanistic understanding across diverse organisms, scales and ‘spheres’ as well as facilitating a new generation of modelling tools to predict ecosystem function. In this special thematic BG session we gather ecologists, biogeochemists and evolutionary biologists together to examine the -omic tool-boxes now available to examine and interpret the form and function of organisms and communities, and the efforts now being made to integrate this knowledge across biological and temporal scales. By combining eco-evolutionary knowledge with ecosystem-level concepts of community traits and resilience we hope to develop and encourage future BG sessions that use integrated ‘omics’ and ‘meta-omics’ approaches with other biogeoscience techniques to provide a deeper mechanistic understanding.

Solicited Speakers Information:

Scott Saleska is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona and where he is co-Director of BRIDGES, an NSF-funded graduate training program to Build Resources for InterDisciplinary training in Genomic and Ecosystem Sciences; and Science Director of the Landscape Evolution Observatory at Biosphere 2.

Chris Bowler is research director at the CNRS and director of the Plant and Algae Genomics Laboratory at the Institut de biologie de l'École normale supérieure in Paris.

Linnea Honeker is a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, specializing in soil microbiome bioinformatics.

Abraham Nqabutho Dabengwa is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Evolutionary Studies Institute, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Anna Mankowski is a marine microbiologist and bioinformatician working as a postdoctoral fellow at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany.

Luciana Chavez Rodriguez is a soil modeler working as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California, Irvine, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Kristen Kuesel is a Full Professor of Aquatic Geomicrobiology at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany, and one of the founding directors of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv).

Jenni Hultman is a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Institute Finland (LUKE).

Alex Chase is a member of faculty at the Southern Methodist University in the Department of Earth Sciences, Texas, USA.

Thomas Dussarrat is a postdoctoral researcher at the Bielefeld University, Germany.

Laura Meredith is an Associate Professor of Ecosystem Genomics at the University of Arizona, USA.

Pierre Amato is a researcher at the CNRS, Clermont-Ferrand, France.