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The discovery of abundant viruses in the oceans and on land has ushered in a quarter century of groundbreaking advancements in our understanding of viruses within ecosystems. Two types of observations from environmental samples — direct counts of viral particles and viral metagenomic sequences — have been critical to these discoveries. Accurate direct counts have established ecosystem-scale trends in the impacts of viral infection on microbial host populations and have shown that viral communities within aquatic and soil environments respond to both short term and seasonal environmental change. Direct counts have been critical for estimating viral production rate, a measurement essential to quantifying the implications of viral infection for the biogeochemical cycling of nutrients within ecosystems. While direct counts have defined the magnitude of viral processes; shotgun sequences of …