In a monumental field expedition, a team of researchers at the University of Hawai'i (UH) at Mānoa School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology (SOEST) collected more than 3,000 samples of microbes and microbiomes present in the entire watershed of Waimea Valley on O'ahu, Hawai'i. Their investigation revealed three key discoveries: microbes follow the food web, most of the microbial diversity in a watershed is maintained within the soil and stream water, and the local distribution of a microbe predicts its global distribution. Their findings were published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.