With almost 700 Pg of carbon, marine dissolved organic carbon (DOC) stores more carbon than all living biomass on Earth combined. However, the controls behind the persistence and the spatial patterns of DOC concentrations on the basin scale remain …
The rampant loss of biodiversity is starting to be recognized as a global crisis rivaling the climate emergency. To address this crisis, scientists need robust methods to measure the diversity in a system. Importantly, these methods should not only count species but capture the variety of different functions that the species in a system can perform. In this paper, we propose a machine learning method by which existing data from ecosystem monitoring can be reanalyzed to reveal changes of functional biodiversity over time.
Mechanisms terminating phytoplankton blooms are often not well understood. Potentially involved processes such as consumption by grazers, flocculation, and viral lysis each have different post-bloom consequences on the processing of the organic …
The dynamics of trait-based metacommunities have attracted much attention, but not much is known about how dispersal and spatial environmental variability mutually interact with each other to drive coexistence patterns and diversity. Here, we present …
Metacommunity ecology currently lacks a consistent functional trait perspective across trophic levels. To foster new cross-taxa experiments and field studies, we present hypotheses on how three trait dimensions change along gradients of density of …
We analyse data on marine unicellular phytoplankton, exhibiting an astounding diversity of cell sizes and shapes. We quantify the variation in size and shape and explore their effects on taxonomic diversity. We find that cells of intermediate volume exhibit the greatest shape variation, with shapes ranging from oblate to extremely elongated forms, while very small and large cells are mostly compact. We show that cell shape has a strong effect on phytoplankton diversity, comparable in magnitude to the effect of cell volume, with both traits explaining up to 92% of the variance in phytoplankton diversity. Species richness decays exponentially with cell elongation and displays a log-normal dependence on cell volume, peaking for compact cells of intermediate volume.