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Motivation Here, we make available a second version of the BioTIME database, which compiles records of abundance estimates for species in sample events of ecological assemblages through time. The updated version expands version 1.0 of the database by doubling the number of studies and includes substantial additional curation to the taxonomic accuracy of the records, as well as the metadata. Moreover, we now provide an R packag...
Marine microbes are important in biogeochemical cycling, but the nature and magnitude of their contributions are influenced by their associated viruses. In the presence of a lytic virus, cells that have evolved resistance to infection have an obvious fitness advantage over relatives that remain susceptible. However, susceptible cells remain extant in the wild, implying that the evolution of a fitness advantage in one dimension...
Trophic strategies of picoeukaryotic phytoplankton vary over time and with depth in the North Pacific Subtropical GyreNARA Subscribed
In oligotrophic oceans, the smallest eukaryotic phytoplankton are both significant primary producers and predators of abundant bacteria such as Prochlorococcus . However, the drivers and consequences of community dynamics among these diverse protists are not well understood. Here, we investigated how trophic strategies along the autotrophy‐mixotrophy spectrum vary in importance over time and across depths at Station ALOHA in t...
The dimensionality of infection networks among viruses infecting microbial eukaryotes and bacteriaNARA Subscribed
Diverse viruses and their hosts are interconnected through complex networks of infection, which are thought to influence ecological and evolutionary processes, but the principles underlying infection network structure are not well understood. Here we focus on network dimensionality and how it varies across 37 networks of viruses infecting eukaryotic phytoplankton and bacteria. We find that dimensionality is often strikingly lo...
In sunlit waters, significant predation is performed by unicellular, phagotrophic mixotrophs, that is, predators that also possess plastids. The success of a mixotrophic lifestyle will depend in part on how well mixotrophs acquire prey relative to specialized heterotrophs. Likewise, consequences of mixotrophy for productivity and element cycling will depend on the rate and efficiency at which mixotrophs consume prey biomass re...
Giant Tree Frog diversification in West and Central Africa: Isolation by physical barriers, climate, and reproductive traitsNARA Subscribed
Secondary sympatry amongst sister lineages is strongly associated with genetic and ecological divergence. This pattern suggests that for closely related species to coexist in secondary sympatry, they must accumulate differences in traits that mediate ecological and/or reproductive isolation. Here, we characterized inter‐ and intraspecific divergence in three giant tree frog species whose distributions stretch across West and C...
Toward trait‐based food webs: Universal traits and trait matching in planktonic predator–prey and host–parasite relationshipsNARA Subscribed
There is a growing consensus that traits offer a powerful way to examine the relationship between the environment, organismal strategies, species interactions, and ecological success. To date, trait‐based research has largely been focusing on individual trophic levels and not on cross‐level interactions. Looking at traits not only within but across trophic levels and identifying traits that together define trophic interactions...
Viruses span an impressive size range, with genome length varying a thousandfold and virion volume nearly a millionfold. For cellular organisms the scaling of traits with size is a pervasive influence on ecological processes, but whether size plays a central role in viral ecology is unknown. Here, we focus on viruses of aquatic unicellular organisms, which exhibit the greatest known range of virus size. We outline hypotheses w...
Mixotrophic nanoflagellates can account for more than half of the bacterivory in the sunlit ocean, yet very little is known about their ecophysiology. Here, we characterize the grazing ecology of an open‐ocean mixotroph in the genus Florenciella (class Dictyochophyceae). Members of this class were indirectly implicated as major consumers of Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus in the oligotrophic North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, b...
Evolutionarily stable communities: a framework for understanding the role of trait evolution in the maintenance of diversityNARA Subscribed
Biological diversity depends on the interplay between evolutionary diversification and ecological mechanisms allowing species to coexist. Current research increasingly integrates ecology and evolution over a range of timescales, but our common conceptual framework for understanding species coexistence requires better incorporation of evolutionary processes. Here, we focus on the idea of evolutionarily stable communities ( ESC...
Motivation The BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community‐led open‐source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal...
Community trait structure in phytoplankton: seasonal dynamics from a method for sparse trait dataNARA Subscribed
The distribution of functional traits in communities, and how trait distributions shift over time and space, is critical information for understanding community structure, the maintenance of diversity, and community effects on ecosystem function. It is often the case that traits tightly linked to ecological performance, such as physiological capacities, are laborious to measure and largely unknown for speciose communities; how...
Phytoplankton growth and the interaction of light and temperature: A synthesis at the species and community levelNARA Subscribed
Temperature strongly affects phytoplankton growth rates, but its effect on communities and ecosystem processes is debated. Because phytoplankton are often limited by light, temperature should change community structure if it affects the traits that determine competition for light. Furthermore, the aggregate response of phytoplankton communities to temperature will depend on how changes in community structure scale up to bulk r...
Nutrient utilization traits of phytoplanktonNARA Subscribed
This paper presents a compilation of nutrient utilization traits of marine and freshwater phytoplankton. The literature was comprehensively searched for culture experiments using nitrate, ammonium, or phosphate as the limiting nutrient. The following traits were extracted: the response of growth to nutrient supply (maximum growth rate under unlimited nutrient supply and the nutrient concentration at which growth is half‐satura...
Volatile communication between plants causing enhanced defence has been controversial. Early studies were not replicated, and influential reviews questioned the validity of the phenomenon. We collected 48 well‐replicated studies and found overall support for the hypothesis that resistance increased for individuals with damaged neighbours. Laboratory or greenhouse studies and those conducted on agricultural crops showed stronge...
Functional traits explain phytoplankton responses to environmental gradients across lakes of the United StatesNARA Subscribed
Ecological communities exhibit regular shifts in structure along environmental gradients, but it has proved difficult to dissect the mechanisms by which environmental conditions determine the relative success of species. Functional traits may provide a link between environmental drivers and mechanisms of community membership, but this has not been well tested for phytoplankton, which dominate primary production in many aquatic...
The biogeography of marine plankton traitsNARA Subscribed
Changes in marine plankton communities driven by environmental variability impact the marine food web and global biogeochemical cycles of carbon and other elements. To predict and assess these community shifts and their consequences, ecologists are increasingly investigating how the functional traits of plankton determine their relative fitness along environmental and biological gradients. Laboratory, field and modelling studi...
Functional traits explain phytoplankton community structure and seasonal dynamics in a marine ecosystemNARA Subscribed
A fundamental yet elusive goal of ecology is to predict the structure of communities from the environmental conditions they experience. Trait‐based approaches to terrestrial plant communities have shown that functional traits can help reveal the mechanisms underlying community assembly, but such approaches have not been tested on the microbes that dominate ecosystem processes in the ocean. Here, we test whether functional trai...
Allometric scaling and taxonomic variation in nutrient utilization traits and maximum growth rate of phytoplanktonNARA Subscribed
Nutrient utilization traits can be used to link the ecophysiology of phytoplankton to population dynamic models and the structure of communities across environmental gradients. Here we analyze a comprehensive literature compilation of four traits: maximum nutrient uptake rate; the half‐saturation constant for nutrient uptake; the minimum subsistence quota, measured for nitrate and phosphate; and maximum growth rate. We also us...
Multivariate trade‐offs, succession, and phenological differentiation in a guild of colonial invertebratesNARA Subscribed
For competing species limited by one or few resources, diversity is thought to be maintained by trade‐offs that allow niche differentiation without resource partitioning. However, few studies have quantified multiple key traits for each species in a guild and shown that trade‐offs among these traits apply across the guild. Here we document strong bivariate and multivariate relationships among growth rate, fecundity, longevity,...