Abstract
Earth's polar and alpine regions comprise a range of distinct habitats and ecosystems that share important common traits. Their biogeochemical and ecological processes are mostly driven by microorganisms, and Theky are extremely vulnerable to the ongoing climate change.
Polar and Alpine Microbiology is, therefore, an important and timely discipline, evolved from initial descriptive studies of various habitats and environments into a fully-fledged hypothesis-driven research feld that uses state-of-the-art feld- and laboratory-based approaches including different omics techniques, incubation experiments, geochemical analysis and mathematical modeling. The underlying research objective of Polar and Alpine Microbiology is to anter the questions of how microorganisms respond to the current rapid climate warming and how their responses impal on the functioning of the Earth system.