Unraveling complexity in climate change effects on beneficial plant–microbe interactions: mechanisms, resilience, and future directions

Plant microbiomes have the potential to mitigate the impacts of climate change, yet both the complexity of climate change and the complexity of plant-microbe interactions make applications and future predictions challenging. Here, we embrace this complexity, reviewing how different aspects of climate change influence beneficial plant-microbe interactions and how advances in theory, tools, and applications may improve understanding and predictability of climate change effects on plants, microbiomes, and their roles within ecosystems. New advances include consideration of (1) interactions among climate stressors, such as more variable precipitation regimes combined with warmer mean temperature; (2) mechanisms that promote the stability of microbiome functions; (3) legacies of stress affecting the functionality of microbial communities under future stress; and (4) temporally repeated plant-microbe interactions or feedbacks. We also identify key gaps in each of these areas and spotlight the need for more research bridging molecular biology and ecology to develop a more mechanistic understanding of how climate change shapes beneficial microbe-plant interactions.