Abstract
The ocean is home to myriad small planktonic organisms that underpin the functioning of marine ecosystems. However, their spatial patterns of diversity and the underlying drivers remain poorly known, precluding projections of their responses to global changes. Here we investigate the latitudinal gradients and global predictors of plankton diversity across archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, and major virus clades using both molecular and imaging data from Tara Oceans. We show a decline of diversity for most planktonic groups toward the poles, mainly driven by decreasing ocean temperatures. Projections into the future suggest that severe warming of the surface ocean by the end of the 21st century could lead to tropicalization of the diversity of most planktonic groups in temperate and polar regions. These changes may have multiple consequences for marine ecosystem functioning and services and are expected to be particularly significant in key areas for carbon sequestration, fisheries, and marine conservation.
Keywords
climate warming, high-throughput imaging, high-throughput sequencing, latitudinal diversity gradient, macroecology, plankton functional groups, Tara Oceans, temperature, trans-kingdom diversity
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
1-1-2019
Publication Title
Cell
Publisher
Elsevier
School
Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research
RAS ID
31087
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
Ibarbalz, F. M., Henry, N., Brandão, M. C., Martini, S., Busseni, G., Byrne, H., ... Picheral, M. (2019). Global trends in marine plankton diversity across kingdoms of life. Cell, 179(5), 1084-1097. Available here