Meta-omics technologies offer new tools to understand how microbial and plant functional diversity shape biogeochemical cycles across ecosystems. This perspective explores how integrating omics data with ecological and modeling approaches can improve our understanding of greenhouse gas fluxes and nutrient dynamics, from soils to clouds, and from the past to the future. We highlight challenges and opportunities for scaling omics insights from local processes to Earth system models.

Nitrogen moves through the environment in ways that are difficult to predict because key transformations occur very rapidly. A short-lived compound, nitrite, plays a central role in determining whether nitrogen is stored, recycled, or lost to the atmosphere. Focusing on nitrite provides a new way to understand nitrogen cycling and its impact on greenhouse gas emissions and environmental change.

In addition to reducing emissions, vast quantities of CO₂ will need to be removed from the atmosphere to meet climate goals. One strategy known as Marine Anoxic Carbon Storage (MACS) would bury plant carbon for thousands of years in parts in the ocean that lack oxygen, where carbon preservation can be highly efficient. We evaluate the environmental and other impacts of hypothetical large-scale MACS deployment from an interdisciplinary, international perspective and present a research roadmap.

Fish otolith formation is key for understanding the incorporation of elements into biominerals. It is often assumed that the final step of biomineralization consists of inorganic precipitation as the fluid where biominerals form can hardly be sampled. Thanks to fish ear anatomy, this can be overcome with otoliths. By comparing otolith formation and inorganic precipitation, we proved that this assumption is not always true. Our findings could refine models and shed light on biomineralization.