Australian Microbiome
The Australian Microbiome (AM) is a nationwide, collaborative project established in 2019 to characterise microbial diversity across Australia’s terrestrial and marine environments. It builds on previous initiatives and has been supported by a consortium of over 40 institutions, including government, research, and industry partners. AM enables large-scale spatial and temporal studies by resourcing the collection, standardisation, and discoverability of FAIR microbiome data, paired with rich contextual metadata. Through its data portal, training modules, and clearly documented workflows, AM supports a wide range of end-users in research, management, monitoring, and R&D. The project continues to evolve, expanding its data infrastructure, end-user support, and the capacity to integrate externally resourced data.
While not exclusively focused on marine environments, AM’s marine dataset includes over >9,000 samples (water, sediment, hosts) and describes microbial assemblages in the southern hemisphere from latitudes 0 to 66°S, longitudes 74°E to 174°W, temperatures -1.6 to 31.4°C and water depths 0 to 6,015 m. This dataset combines one-off spatial samples and long-term temporal observations from key locations in Australian shelf waters (e.g., IMOS National Reference Stations), coasts and estuaries, as well as repeated oceanographic transects (e.g., Southern Ocean Time Series, GO-SHIP). These time-series data underpin national-scale monitoring of ocean health, biogeochemistry, and productivity, supporting sites of ecological, economic, and public health significance. AM’s open, collaborative structure and growing capabilities position it as a crucial platform for understanding and managing Australia’s microbial biodiversity.
The Oceania region is often underrepresented in global initiatives and through becoming an Ocean Decade-endorsed project under OBON and connecting with the OBON community we seek to enhance collaboration and contribute this critical regional dataset to OBON’s global network of biomolecular observing capacity.
We would like to acknowledge the contribution of the Australian Microbiome consortium in the generation of data. The Australian Microbiome initiative is supported by funding from Bioplatforms Australia and the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) through the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), Parks Australia through the Bush Blitz program funded by the Australian Government and BHP, and the CSIRO.
Lead Institute
Collaborating institutes
Project period
7 January, 2019 – 30 June, 2027