Early in the inception of ecology as a field of science, microorganisms have been known to play a role in ecosystems. The growth of the portfolio of journals from the Ecological Society of America (ESA) correlates to an increase in the studies of microbial ecology through time. The aim of this retrospective is to discuss some of the foundational and highly cited works within the ESA portfolio just as a new track in Ecosphere is dedicated solely to microbial ecology. Related search terms found that 13.3 % of the papers published in ESA journals had some reference to microbial ecology. Most studies were in terrestrial systems with fewer in aquatic systems, and very few in marine systems. Themes such as host-microbe symbioses, climate change and biogeography are likely to increase steadily in the literature.

The brief methods of collecting data for this retrospective included a literature search of ESA journals only, using JStor for 1920-1976 and Web of Science for 1976-2025 (October). The microbial ecology search terms were pathogen, bacter*, fung* and microb*. They were screened to remove articles where the search terms were used in the authors’ addresses and binned into substrates; terrestrial, aquatic, marine, laboratory and other. Other was assigned to articles that mentioned multiple substrates or were completely theoretical. There are many duplicates in the dataset because more than one of the search terms applied to a given paper. An additional screening of papers was done to establish high citation rates, and many of these are discussed below. Discussed papers were selected to balance among various themes, not solely on citation rates. It is also important to note that using high citation rates will reflect the biases of authors in our field towards white male authors, especially in the earlier years (Beck 2014). Citation numbers were from Google Scholar for publications before 1976 and from Web of Science for publications within the 1976-October 2025 time frame.