Individual-level trait diversity predicts phytoplankton community properties better than species richness or evenness.

ABSTRACT: Understanding how microbial diversity influences ecosystem properties is of paramount importance. Cellular traits-which determine responses to the abiotic and biotic environment-may help us rigorously link them. However, our capacity to measure traits in natural communities has thus far been limited. Here we compared the predictive power of trait richness (trait space coverage), evenness (regularity in trait distribution) and divergence (prevalence of extreme phenotypes) derived from individual-based measurements with two species-level metrics (taxonomic richness and evenness) when modelling the productivity of natural phytoplankton communities. Using phytoplankton data obtained from 28 lakes sampled at different spatial and temporal scales, we found that the diversity in individual-level

SUBMITTER: Fontana S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5776449 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature