microntology: a lightweight, data-driven controlled vocabulary to describe earth's microbial habitats

<h4>Motivation</h4>Data-enabled studies of microbial ecology and evolution depend on high-quality descriptions of microbial habitats, based on curated and consolidated vocabularies.<h4>Results</h4>We introduce microntology v1.0, a pragmatic controlled vocabulary of 148 terms to describe microbial habitats and lifestyles, and provide manually curated microntology annotations for >300k metagenomic samples from public repositories.<h4>Availability</h4>microntology controlled vocabulary terms and term hierarchies (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.19730167), and curated annotations for 305 626 metagenomic samples (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.18164252) are available via Zenodo and spire.embl.de/downloads. Underlying code is available via github.com/grp-schmidt/microntology and Zenodo (doi: 10.5281/zenodo.20323497). User feedback, suggestions and bug reports are welcome at github.com/grp-schmidt/microntology/issues.