A team of researchers has concluded that different types of phytoplankton will react differently to increasing ocean temperatures resulting from the changing climate. An examination of how four key groups of phytoplankton will respond to ocean temperatures forecast to occur between 2080 and 2100 suggests that their growth rates and distribution patterns will likely be dissimilar, resulting in significant implications for the future composition of marine communities around the globe.

But a team of researchers at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, led by former doctoral student Stephanie Anderson, has concluded that different types of phytoplankton will react differently. An examination of how four key groups of phytoplankton will respond to ocean temperatures forecast to occur between 2080 and 2100 suggests that their growth rates and distribution patterns will likely be dissimilar, resulting in significant implications for the future composition of marine communities around the globe.

«Phytoplankton are some of the most diverse organisms on Earth, and they fix roughly as much carbon as all the land plants in the world combined,» said Anderson, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. «Every other breath you take is generated by phytoplankton. And which ones are present affects which fish can be supported in a given region.»

Anderson, URI Oceanography Professor Tatiana Rynearson and colleagues from MIT, Scripps Institute of Oceanography and Old Dominion University published the results of their research in the Nov. 5 issue of the journal Nature Communications.

«This study represents a key contribution to the understanding of how phytoplankton respond to ocean warming,» said Rynearson. «All climate change forecasts of marine ecosystems include a term that reflects how we think phytoplankton growth responds to temperature. In this study we’ve generated new, more accurate values for the temperature-growth response that better reflect the diversity of phytoplankton in the ocean. These new values can be used in future climate change forecasts, helping them to become more accurate. «

The researchers compiled temperature-related growth measurements from more than 80 existing research studies on four types of phytoplankton — diatoms, which thrive in high-nutrient regions; cyanobacteria, which dominate in the open ocean where nutrients are low; coccolithophores, which are especially important in the uptake of carbon; and dinoflagellates, which migrate vertically in the water column. They also reviewed the heat tolerance for each group and conducted a simulation of projected temperatures to determine how phytoplankton distribution and growth rates would change in different parts of the world.

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