Climate genomics—Geoscientists, ecologists, and geneticists must reinforce their collaborations to confront climate change

Geoscientists and ecologists alike must confront the impact of climate change on ecosystems and the services they provide. In the marine realm, major changes are projected in net primary and export production, with significant repercussions on food security, carbon storage, and climate system feedbacks. However, these projections do not include the potential for rapid linear evolution to facilitate adaptation to environmental change. Climate genomics confronts this challenge by assessing the vulnerability of ecosystem services to climate change. Because DNA is the primary biological repository of detectable environmentally selected mutations (showing evidence of change before impacts arise in morphological or metabolic patterns), genomics provides a window into selection in response to climate change, while also recording neutral processes deriving from stochastic mechanisms (Lowe et al., Trends in Ecology & Evolution, 2017; 32:141–152). Due to the revolution afforded by sequencing technology developments, genomics can now meet ecologists and climate scientists in a cross‐disciplinary space fertile for collaborations. Collaboration between geoscientists, ecologists, and geneticists must be reinforced in order to combine modeling and genomics approaches at every scale to improve our understanding and the management of ecosystems under climate change. To this end, we present advances in climate genomics from plankton to larger vertebrates, stressing the interactions between modeling and genomics, and identifying future work needed to develop and expand the field of climate genomics.

methods integrate concepts derived from genetics, such as population structure and adaptation, into projections of species distributions.GEA and gSDM are widely used in plankton microbial ecology, often associating metabarcoding data to environmental parameters such as chlorophyll, temperature, salinity, and nutrients, to project variations in the diversity of plankton groups in response to climate change (Busseni et al., 2020).Critically, these studies already reveal key marine areas undergoing significant biodiversity fluctuations likely related to climate change, with subsequent impacts on ecosystem services.A recent gSDM study used plankton metagenomic, environmental, and carbon-export data to project a decrease in carbon export to the seafloor via the biological carbon pump by the end of the century (Frémont et al., 2022).Such a decrease would result in a positive feedback on atmospheric CO 2 and reinforce climate change.
The reorganization of plankton trophic networks impacts fisheries and exclusive economic zones (Frémont et al., 2022).Such community restructuring was revealed at even finer levels through genomics, using single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) within metagenomic reads to identify ecotypes adapted to different temperature and oceanic regions (Leconte et al., 2021).These adaptations derive from changes in proteins at the amino acid level that determine their structure and stability at different temperatures.Combining SNVs and expression analysis is key to understanding the environmental niches of plankton.

| Changes in plankton can inform climate change projections
Improving biogeochemical as well as biogeographical modeling efforts are both needed to confront the challenge of understanding climate change impacts on ecosystem services.Planetary scale biogeochemical models are improving the representation of both phytoplankton types and micronutrients that limit primary productivity, such as iron, zinc, and cobalt (Séférian et al., 2020).Researchers have managed to directly integrate metatranscriptomic data into modeling frameworks, revealing patterns of nutrient limitation in large parts of the ocean (Ustick et al., 2021).Climate genomics will improve our understanding of biotic interactions linked to the environment and the carbon pump, functional genomic diversity, functional biogeography, and ultimately species' responses to climate change.

| Informing conservation and ecosystem management
At the cutting edge of climate genomics, studies in vertebrates integrate data on population structure and local adaptation using GEA and gSDM to improve conservation management and spatial planning under climate change.Studies in birds use SNVs to link environmental variables to genomic variation, defining genomic vulnerability based on the presence or absence of genotypes predicted to facilitate adaptation to climate change (Ruegg et al., 2018).Climate vulnerability analyses combine genetic diversity, isolation, and geographic parameters with climate scenarios to identify populations at greatest future risk (Creech et al., 2020).Work in our research group uses whole-genome resequencing data in a GEA and gSDM to assess climate change risks to species of Antarctic top fish predators reliant on sea-ice extent for their early-life history, improving fisheries management and marine spatial planning in the Southern Ocean.

| Integrate dispersal modeling into predictions of species distribution shifts
Marine climate genomics studies must include hydrographic data related to circulation patterns, which can strongly influence species distributions (Richter et al., 2022).An outstanding challenge to this goal is the integration of ocean circulation at multiple scales, including 10-100 km or smaller scales, that are marginally resolved or even subgrid for most of the Earth System Models, but that are nonetheless crucially important for structuring marine ecosystems.

| Include biodiversity data in Earth System Models
Given the increasing amount of data available from multiple largescale biogeochemical sampling efforts in the open and coastal oceans, future work in climate genomics must confront the challenge of integrating genomic data (e.g., SNVs, metagenomes, and metatranscriptomes) into modeling efforts.Biodiversity data from climate genomics studies will improve biogeochemical modeling efforts, for example, via functional genomics studies that investigate the metabolism of primary producers, informing our understanding of material cycling and nutrient fluxes (Frémont et al., 2022;Ustick et al., 2021).Ultimately, these advances should lead to the improved representation of carbon-climate feedbacks in the Earth System.

| Promote interdisciplinary collaborations between geoscientists, ecologists, and geneticists
Tackling climate change impacts on marine ecosystems necessitates the reorganization of a large part of the scientific community in order to achieve this common goal.Collaboration with geoscientists is needed to correctly implement climate data in genomics studies investigating climate change impacts on species, including the use of appropriate Earth System Models and relevant environmental variables and data.Such collaborations must be promoted through interdisciplinary meetings and conferences (e.g., the May 2022 conference on Clima te Scien ce for Ecolo gical Forec asting, and the September 2022 Clima te chang e genom ics workshop), as well as special issues or dedicated journals (e.g., June 2022 Journ al of Anima l Ecology Speci al Featu re: Under stand ing clima te chang e respo nse in the age of genomics), and funding calls (via, e.g., Biodi versa-style funding calls to support projects across research groups working toward the understanding of climate change impacts on species and ecosystems).In the near future, such funding should be used to create stable multidisciplinary research groups, either in the form of virtual institutes that bring together scientists from existing teams or in the creation of new departments and brick-and-mortar institutions.Over the long term, we must not limit our vision to existing structures and consider the collective political and financial will that drove the creation of infrastructure efforts such as CERN and the ISS.These entities were created in response to international needs that go beyond the capacities of a single country.Beyond the design of new research structures, we must implement novel working models to advance, assess, and recalibrate progress toward our understanding of climate change impacts on ecosystems.

| CON CLUS ION
Climate genomics represents a necessary framework to reinforce the ever-pressing push to understand how climate change will impact ecosystem services.GEA and gSDM are powerful climate genomics tools to improve the accuracy of predicted distributions using population structure and local adaptation data, informing better conservation and management practices.As a field, climate genomics provides us with unprecedented capacity to understand and predict climate change impacts on biodiversity at the level of species, populations, and eventually, ecosystems as a whole.Multinational funding and reimagined scientific organization are necessary to promote the cross-disciplinary collaborations critical to the continued growth of climate genomics and ultimately to our capacity to safeguard ecosystem services against the menace of climate change.

CO N FLI C T O F I NTE R E S T S TATE M E NT
There are no conflicts of interest among the authors.