Microbes are everywhere. Every organism, from the smallest bee to the tallest tree, hosts vast microbial communities that sustain health and function. A single tree can harbour a trillion bacteria, archaea and fungi within its tissues (Arnold et al., Reference Arnold, Gewirtzman, Raymond, Duguid, Brodersen and Brown2025). Even in the ocean’s hadal trenches at over 5,000 m depth, thriving microbial communities support biodiversity and global carbon cycling (Peng et al., Reference Peng, Du, Gebruk, Liu, Gao and Glud2025). Microbes regulate biogeochemical cycles, control climate-relevant gases, and sustain the existence of all multicellular life. They drive processes such as carbon sequestration, nitrogen fixation, soil fertility, marine productivity, and host digestion and immunity, making them vital to ecosystems, economies and public health (Gilbert et al., Reference Gilbert, Peixoto, Scholz, Dominguez Bello, Korsten and Berg2025). In soils, microbes underpin the growth of every plant, including our food crops, and they fuel evolutionary innovation through horizontal gene transfer and epigenetic interactions. Their associations with plants and animals shape nutrition, disease resistance and behaviour. Research has often focused on the human microbiome, but studies of animals, fungi and plants reveal equally critical host–microbe partnerships, whose absence could cause severe hardship or even extinction.

Over the past decade, rapid advances in multi-omics and computational technologies have revolutionized our view of the microbial world. Microbes are not only ubiquitous, with an estimated trillion genomically distinct strains, but also extraordinarily diverse in their genetic potential and ecological influence. Through integrated metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics, metaproteomics and metatranslatomics, researchers can now observe the molecular fingerprints of microbial life in unprecedented detail, revealing how community structure and gene expression respond dynamically to environmental change. These multi-omics approaches enable scientists to move beyond cataloguing microbial presence to understanding microbial performance in real-time processes.

The parallel emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) has further amplified this transformation (Gilbert & Zengler, Reference Gilbert and Zengler2025). AI models can now synthesize vast, heterogeneous datasets to uncover hidden relationships between microbial traits, gene regulation and ecosystem function. By integrating multi-omics data with spatial, chemical and climate information, AI can predict how microbial networks respond to disturbance, identify keystone species that stabilize ecosystems, and even guide the design of synthetic microbial consortia to enhance soil carbon storage or coral recovery. Together, multi-omics and AI offer a unified framework for observing the unseen, linking microbial behavior to macro-species survival, ecosystem resilience and the future of global conservation.

Despite these advances, global assessments of biodiversity as yet pay scant attention to the microbial world, policy instruments largely ignore it, and conservation organizations have proven almost completely uninterested in extending their work to include microbes (Cockell & Jones, Reference Cockell and Jones2009; Redford, Reference Redford2023). This neglect persists even though microbial innovations could directly support conservation and restoration efforts for all biodiversity (Peixoto et al., Reference Peixoto, Voolstra, Stein, Hugenholtz, Salles and Amin2024). Major health frameworks such as One Health (recognizing that the health of people, all other organisms and the environment are interconnected) also tend to overlook environmental microbial communities, especially those in soils and aquatic systems, despite their foundational importance for ecosystem stability and human well-being. Microbes face the very same existential threats as larger organisms, including land-use change, pollution, ocean warming and acidification, invasive species and co-extinction driven by loss of host species. Crucially, microbes are not only vulnerable but also serve as the planet’s first responders to environmental change, making their inclusion in conservation policy essential for global resilience.

In response to the growing recognition that microbial species and ecosystems are both foundational to life and increasingly imperiled, the IUCN Species Survival Commission (SSC) has formally established the Microbial Conservation Specialist Group (Gilbert et al., Reference Gilbert, Peixoto, Scholz, Dominguez Bello, Korsten and Berg2025), the first body within the IUCN dedicated to the stewardship of all microbial life. An existing Fungal SSC has already led the charge by assessing > 1,000 fungal taxa for the IUCN Red List. The Microbial Conservation Specialist Group represents a critical expansion of IUCN’s mandate and technical competency, acknowledging that conservation cannot succeed without assessing and protecting the microbial communities that sustain biodiversity, ecosystem function and human health. The Specialist Group has received funding from private foundations, Applied Microbiology International and the International Society for Microbial Ecology, to support the development of its strategy.