A fundamental question in ecology is the relation between diversity and function, and a key practical question in global chance science is how microbial ecology regulates feedbacks to climate change through the microbial cycling of greenhouse gases. A longstanding barrier to investigating how these two grand challenge questions are linked has been a lack of tools to probe the connection between microbial diversity, function, and metabolic process. Here we show how new tools for meta-omic integration provide insights into the links between diversity and function of microbial methane cycling, and explain the pattern of increasing methane emissions with permafrost thaw.
