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Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean

BACKGROUND: Despite enormous environmental variability linked to glacial/interglacial climates of the Pleistocene, we have recently shown that marine diatom communities evolved slowly through gradual changes over the past 1.5 million years. Identifying the causes of this ecological stability is key...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Cermeño, Pedro, de Vargas, Colomban, Abrantes, Fátima, Falkowski, Paul G.
Formato: Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2010
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848864/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20368810
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010037
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author Cermeño, Pedro
de Vargas, Colomban
Abrantes, Fátima
Falkowski, Paul G.
author_facet Cermeño, Pedro
de Vargas, Colomban
Abrantes, Fátima
Falkowski, Paul G.
author_sort Cermeño, Pedro
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Despite enormous environmental variability linked to glacial/interglacial climates of the Pleistocene, we have recently shown that marine diatom communities evolved slowly through gradual changes over the past 1.5 million years. Identifying the causes of this ecological stability is key for understanding the mechanisms that control the tempo and mode of community evolution. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: If community assembly were controlled by local environmental selection rather than dispersal, environmental perturbations would change community composition, yet, this could revert once environmental conditions returned to previous-like states. We analyzed phytoplankton community composition across >10(4) km latitudinal transects in the Atlantic Ocean and show that local environmental selection of broadly dispersed species primarily controls community structure. Consistent with these results, three independent fossil records of marine diatoms over the past 250,000 years show cycles of community departure and recovery tightly synchronized with the temporal variations in Earth's climate. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Changes in habitat conditions dramatically alter community structure, yet, we conclude that the high dispersal of marine planktonic microbes erases the legacy of past environmental conditions, thereby decreasing the tempo of community evolution.
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spelling pubmed-28488642010-04-05 Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean Cermeño, Pedro de Vargas, Colomban Abrantes, Fátima Falkowski, Paul G. PLoS One Research Article BACKGROUND: Despite enormous environmental variability linked to glacial/interglacial climates of the Pleistocene, we have recently shown that marine diatom communities evolved slowly through gradual changes over the past 1.5 million years. Identifying the causes of this ecological stability is key for understanding the mechanisms that control the tempo and mode of community evolution. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: If community assembly were controlled by local environmental selection rather than dispersal, environmental perturbations would change community composition, yet, this could revert once environmental conditions returned to previous-like states. We analyzed phytoplankton community composition across >10(4) km latitudinal transects in the Atlantic Ocean and show that local environmental selection of broadly dispersed species primarily controls community structure. Consistent with these results, three independent fossil records of marine diatoms over the past 250,000 years show cycles of community departure and recovery tightly synchronized with the temporal variations in Earth's climate. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: Changes in habitat conditions dramatically alter community structure, yet, we conclude that the high dispersal of marine planktonic microbes erases the legacy of past environmental conditions, thereby decreasing the tempo of community evolution. Public Library of Science 2010-04-02 /pmc/articles/PMC2848864/ /pubmed/20368810 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010037 Text en Cermeno et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Cermeño, Pedro
de Vargas, Colomban
Abrantes, Fátima
Falkowski, Paul G.
Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean
title Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean
title_full Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean
title_fullStr Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean
title_full_unstemmed Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean
title_short Phytoplankton Biogeography and Community Stability in the Ocean
title_sort phytoplankton biogeography and community stability in the ocean
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2848864/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20368810
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010037
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