Environmental control of open‐ocean phytoplankton groups: Now and in the future

By Philip W. Boyd, R. Strzepek, Feixue Fu, D. Hutchins. 2010

323 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Climate change will alter concurrently many environmental factors that exert control over oceanic phytoplankton. Recent laboratory culture work, shipboard experiments, and field surveys reveal many remaining unknowns about the bottom‐up controls for five globally important algal groups. Increasing uncertainties exist, respectively, for picocyanobacteria, diatoms, Phaeocystis spp., N2‐fixing cyanobacteria, and coccolithophores. This missing information about current environmental controls will hinder progress in modeling how these phytoplankton will be influenced by climate change. A review of conceptual approaches used to elucidate the relationship between environmental controls and phytoplankton dominance, from Margalef's mandala to functional traits, uncovered limitations regarding their application to climate‐change scenarios. For example, these previous approaches have insufficient scope or dimensions to take into account the confounding effects of synergistic and antagonistic interactions of multiple environmental change variables. A new approach is needed that considers all of the different environmental properties altered by climate change and their interactions while at the same time permitting a subset of the most significant controls for a specific phytoplankton group to be isolated and evaluated in factorial matrix perturbation experiments. We advocate three new interlinked approaches, including environmental clusters that incorporate all factors (temperature, CO2, light, nutrients, and trace metals), which both exert control over present‐day floristics and will be altered by climate change. By carefully linking a holistic conceptual approach to a reductionist experimental design, the future responses of open‐ocean phytoplankton groups to a complex, rapidly changing environment can be better predicted.

Subfields: Ecology, Oceanography

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2bef986a42da985406f5483aa3676fdd4dadc697

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Citations in the corpus

Differing responses of marine N2 fixers to warming and consequences for future diazotroph community structure (2014, background): “Climate change is predicted to change the biodiversity of marine pelagic ecosystems by altering competitive interactions within the biological community (Hutchins et al. 2009, Boyd et al. 2010, Boyd & Hutchins 2012).”
Ecological niches of open ocean phytoplankton taxa (2015, methodology): “The importance of other limiting abiotic factors (Boyd et al. 2010) as well as biotic interactions such as grazing pressure may render the use of Reynolds’ C-S-R model marginal on global scales.”
The biological pump in a high CO 2 world (2012, background): “Such physiological differences between taxa or species may lead to shifts in phytoplankton composition (Boyd et al. 2010).”
Understanding the responses of ocean biota to a complex matrix of cumulative anthropogenic change (2012, background): “Red arrows: the projected changes in ocean properties due to climate change (Boyd et al. 2010), green arrows: examples of synergistic and/or antagonistic effects of MEDs on the biota (Boyd et al. 2010).”
Iron‐light interactions differ in Southern Ocean phytoplankton (2012, background): “Such climate change– mediated alteration of surface-water properties in the S. Ocean will not occur independently; therefore, the synergistic and antagonistic effects of altered water properties need to be considered when assessing future phytoplanktonic responses (Boyd et al. 2010).”
Global biogeochemical impacts of phytoplankton: a trait‐based perspective (2015, background): “Coccolithophores play a distinct biogeochemical role due to calcification and ballasting of organic matter and have a distinct (and likely varied) ecology that is still being unravelled (Boyd et al. 2010).”
Biogeographical controls on the marine nitrogen fixers (2011, background): “…for growth [Breitbarth et al., 2007; Falcon et al., 2005; Staal et al., 2003; Stal, 2009], and subsequently, it is frequently assumed that diazotrophs grow only in oligotrophic waters warmer than 15°–20°C [Capone and Carpenter, 1982; Capone et al., 1997; Needoba et al., 2007; Boyd et al., 2010].”
The effects of changing climate on microzooplankton grazing and community structure: drivers, predictions and knowledge gaps (2013, background): “…climate regimes can also be expected to affect continental dust inputs to the surface ocean and so alter the delivery of the limiting micronutrient iron to phytoplankton communities, but the magnitude and even the sign of these changes in iron supplies are presently uncertain (Boyd et al., 2010).”
Light and growth in marine phytoplankton: allometric, taxonomic, and environmental variation (2015, background): “Trait variation is thought to be explained in part by consistent differences between major taxonomic groups (Richardson et al. 1983; Cullen and MacIntyre 1998; Boyd et al. 2010) as well as cells of different size (Geider et al. 1986; Finkel 2001).”