Blue-carbon ecosystems, such as mangroves, seagrass meadows, saltmarshes, and seaweed beds, are vital for carbon sequestration and climate regulation, with microorganisms playing key roles in their ecological functions. Despite the rapid growth of metagenomic and amplicon datasets from these ecosystems, no unified platform has been available for their systematic integration and analysis. To address this, we developed BCMBase, a comprehensive database for blue-carbon microbiomes. BCMBase hosts 1,038 metagenomes and 9,602 amplicon datasets, annotated to over 4,511 functional microbial taxa, and incorporates standardized genome and gene catalogs. The platform offers (i) unified data browsing and search, (ii) analysis tools including BCMFunc (rapid function–microbe identification), BCVHP (virus–host prediction), and BCMAnnot (functional gene annotation), and (iii) data submission and download services. By integrating diverse microbial and viral resources, BCMBase enables the discovery of functional taxa, exploration of ecosystem processes, and advances research on blue-carbon sequestration and conservation. BCMBase is freely accessible at http://gbcbase.ocean-meta.com/.
Zhu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.