Coastal oceans play vital role in modulating global scale ecosystem processes including biogeochemical cycling, climate processes and contribute to sustainable blue economy. In Global South, coastal oceans directly support livelihood to millions of coastal communities, foster traditional knowledge and contribute towards pan-regional GDPs. The aquatic microbial communities maintain ecosystem health and functioning of coastal oceans through microbial network. The importance of development of traits and resulting microbial guilds can vary spatially in coastal oceans represented across continents including in South America, Africa and Asia. Increasingly, coastal oceans are reeling from multiple anthropogenic stressors such as ocean acidification, eutrophication and abundance of emerging contaminants like microplastics. These have resulted in the ‘urbanization’ of coastal oceans with potential adverse consequences for ‘One Health’. It is important to study microbial traits including functional resilience and influence on higher trophic levels. In this session, contributions are welcome from researchers including from Global South working on coastal ocean microbiome, microbiome of biotopes including estuaries and mangroves, functional traits in aquatic microbial communities, influence of microbial communities on higher trophic levels, antibiotic resistance and metal resistance genes in microbiomes, resilience of microbial communities against pollutants and role of microbial complexity in biogeochemical cycling.

• Contaminants in the Marine Environment -
• Human-Ocean Connections -
• Marine Ecology and Biodiversity -