Marine dissolved organic matter (DOM) contains more carbon than the combined stocks of Earth’s biota. Organisms in the ocean continuously release a myriad of molecules that become food for microheterotrophs, but, for unknown reasons, a residual …
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.
The number of available sites for establishment is a key determinant of species richness on habitat islands. While most theoretical studies assume habitat size or capacity to be constant, many natural habitats are characterized by dynamic growth in …
The metaecosystem framework has been proposed to conceptualize the interactive effects of dispersal and resource flows on the structure and functioning of communities in a heterogeneous environment. Here, we model a two-patch metaecosystem where two …