Biotic and Abiotic Interactions Shaping Microbiomes in a Changing World

Microorganisms are fundamental drivers of ecosystem processes across terrestrial, aquatic, host-associated, and engineered environments. They support primary production and decomposition, contribute to geochemical cycles and influence host health and ecosystem stability. The structure and functioning of environmental microbiomes emerge from the interplay between abiotic factors (e.g., temperature, moisture, salinity, nutrient availability), disturbance regimes (e.g., fire, pollution), and biotic interactions operating at multiple organizational levels (e.g., microbe-microbe competition and cooperation, metabolic cross-feeding, microbe-host associations, and trophic dynamics within complex food webs). However, ongoing global environmental change, shifts in climate, land use, and biogeochemical conditions are reshaping both environmental filters and biological interaction networks across ecosystems worldwide.This Research Topic aims to address a central challenge in contemporary microbial ecology: understanding how biotic and abiotic interactions jointly structure environmental microbiomes, and how these interactions are influenced by accelerating global change. While microbial responses to climate warming, altered precipitation, ocean acidification, land-use change, and pollution are increasingly documented, the interaction-based mechanisms governing microbiome assembly, stability, and functional resilience remain insufficiently integrated across ecosystems, hampering our ability to predict the effects of human-induced disturbances. We seek to move beyond descriptive patterns toward a mechanistic and predictive framework that links environmental forcing to the rewiring of the network of microbe-microbe interactions, microbe-host associations, and microbial food web dynamics. Recent advances in multi-omics, high-resolution environmental monitoring, ecological network analysis, experimental manipulation, and modelling approaches now allow us to disentangle how interaction networks buffer or amplify environmental perturbations.We welcome Original Research, Reviews, Methods, Perspectives, and Opinion articles addressing, but not limited to:• Microbe-microbe interactions (competition, cooperation, cross-feeding, antagonism, quorum sensing) under environmental stress;• Microbe-host associations in terrestrial systems facing climate and anthropogenic pressures;• Microbial food webs, trophic interactions;• Integration of abiotic filtering and biotic interactions in microbiome assembly across spatial and temporal scales;• Adaptive responses of microbial communities to global change;• Ecological modelling, network inference, structure, resilience and predictive frameworks for microbiome dynamics;• Cross-ecosystem comparisons;• Implications for ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, and climate feedback processes.Please note that Systems Microbiology does not consider descriptive studies that are solely based on amplicon (e.g., 16S rRNA, 18SrRNA, ITS and other marker genes) profiles, unless they are accompanied by a clear hypothesis and experimentation, and provide insight into the microbiological system or process being studied. Topic editors: Claudia Coleine, Eleonora Egidi, Claudio Donati Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/79346/biotic-and-abiotic-interactions-shaping-microbiomes-in-a-changing-world