MiCoDa aims to facilitate synthetic research in microbial ecology regardless of access to infrastructure, funding, training, and language barriers, while also harnessing existing human capital and data resources to provide new insights into microbial ecology. Going forward, our aims are:

• To update and grow the existing MiCoDa database: we will use the established data mining pipeline to expand the range of data collection to more journals and more recent publications, and fine-tune this pipeline so that the database can be updated every two years. The database will be reprocessed using the UFZ High Performance Computing Cluster.
• To reduce asymmetry in research and foster equitability in data reuse through Datathon events. Each November, we organize a three-day event to build capacity and encourage the use of MiCoDa among researchers from biodiversity blind spots and low income countries. These datathons invite researchers from different areas of the world to participate in the collection and preparation of local sequence data for their addition to the next MiCoDa update. English, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and French are the main languages in which ecology is published, and will be directly targeted by these outreach events. The first Datathon took place in October 2022 in Argentina and Uruguay, the second across Latin America (2023), the third will take place across Africa (2024), and a fourth is planned across South Asia (2025).
• To increase interoperability in microbiome data. In order to bolster the use of microbiome data across disciplines, and the integration of microbes into broader ecological theory, MiCoDa pre-processed microbiome datasets. In the future, integration of MiCoDa with other databases (i.e., GBIF) and the development of novel software will increase the findability and reuse options for MiCoDa data.