Global change has resulted in a significant reduction of biodiversity on all trophic levels in our environment, often allowing for an invasion of new species, which change ecosystem properties. Changes in ecosystem properties influence ecosystem services, and in many cases human health or wellbeing is highly impacted. This strong interconnection between environmental properties and human health has promoted the so called “One Health” or “Global Health” concept.
In plants, animals and humans, dysbiotic conditions create health problems including the emergence of new diseases. Well studied examples are now emerging of new pathogens or the continuous increase of antibiotic resistance in many microbes. Beyond infectious diseases, allergies are strongly influenced by environmental microbiomes as our immune system requires a high contact with diverse microbiota mainly during early life for stimulation. This makes it evident that the interaction patterns of environmental- and human microbiomes are essential for human health and understanding microbial ecology and ecological principles of these interactions beyond pure analysis of co-occurrence plays a crucial role for developing targeted mitigation strategies or therapies in the future. Thus One Health approaches that include collaborations across various disciplines and within and across various nations are needed more than ever to achieve the best health outcomes possible.
This Special Issue in Microbial Ecology is dedicated to the interactions of humans, animals and plants, their microbial ecology and how they interact in their shared environments to enable One Health. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
The Microbial Ecology of land use
Antimicrobial resistance mitigation
Climate and ecosystem health
Disease surveillance
The health of our Environment
Food Safety and Security
Plant / Soil health
Water Safety and Security
Environmental contamination