Linking traits to species diversity and community structure in phytoplankton

By Elena Litchman, Paula de Tezanos Pinto, C. Klausmeier, Mridul K. Thomas, Kohei Yoshiyama. Hydrobiologia, 2010

334 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In addition to answering Hutchinson’s question “Why are there so many species?”, we need to understand why certain species are found only under certain environmental conditions and not others. Trait-based approaches are being increasingly used in ecology to do just that: explain and predict species distributions along environmental gradients. These approaches can be successful in understanding the diversity and community structure of phytoplankton. Among major traits shaping phytoplankton distributions are resource utilization traits, morphological traits (with size being probably the most influential), grazer resistance traits, and temperature responses. We review these trait-based approaches and give examples of how trait data can explain species distributions in both freshwater and marine systems. We also outline new directions in trait-based approaches applied to phytoplankton such as looking simultaneously at trait and phylogenetic structure of phytoplankton communities and using adaptive dynamics models to predict trait evolution.

Subfields: Environmental Chemistry, Global and Planetary Change, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1f7fe5dd5137817a46edf117e6af0095bcd029e8

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Citations in the corpus

Functional classifications and their application in phytoplankton ecology (2015, background): “…last few decades, various attempts have been made to categorise traits and functions in the phytoplankton (Lewis, 1976; Litchman & Klausmeier, 2008; Litchman et al., 2010), most recently opening new research perspectives in ‘chemotaxonomy’ (Descy, Sarmento & Higgins, 2009) and ‘ecometabolomics’…”
Phytoplankton niches, traits and eco-evolutionary responses to global environmental change (2012, positive): “The geographic range of the tropical cyanobacterium Trichodesmium erythraeum was estimated using its thermal tolerance curve (Chappell & Webb 2010), fitted to the function of Norberg (2004), and the monthly mean ocean temperature data from the NOAA World Ocean Atlas 2009 (Locarnini et al. 2010).”
ERSEM 15.06: a generic model for marine biogeochemistry and the ecosystem dynamics of the lower trophic levels (2015, background): “The choice to characterise groups according to their size reflects the importance of size as a physiological trait (Litchman et al., 2007, 2010), which influences an organism’s competitive ability through its effect on nutrient acquisition, carbon and nutrient storage, the intracellular trans-2485…”
Invited Review - Fight on Plankton! or, Phytoplankton Shape and Size as Adaptive Tools to Get Ahead in the Struggle for Life (2011, background): “…being increasingly used in phytoplankton ecology to explain and predict species distributions along environmental gradients (e.g. Reynolds et al., 2002; Weithoff, 2003; Litchman et al., 2007, 2010; Naselli-Flores et al., 2007a; Litchman & Klausmeier, 2008; Padisák et al., 2009; Kruk et al., 2010).”