Composition and dominance of edible and inedible phyto-plankton predict responses of Baltic Sea summer communities to elevated temperature and CO2

DOI

Previous studies with Baltic Sea phytoplankton combining elevated seawater temperature with CO2 revealed the importance of size trait-based analyses, in particular dividing the plankton in-to edible (> 5 and < 100 µm) and inedible ( 100 µm) size classes for mesozoopankton grazers. While the edible phytoplankton responded predominantly negative to warming and the inedible group stayed unaffected or increased, independent from edibility most phyto-plankton groups gained from CO2. Because the ratio between edible and inedible taxa changes profoundly over seasons, we investigated, if community responses can be predicted according to the prevailing composition of edible and inedible groups. We experimentally explored the combined effects of elevated temperatures and CO2 concentrations on a late-summer Baltic Sea community. Total phytoplankton significantly increased in response to elevated CO2 in particu-lar in combination with temperature, driven by a significant gain of the inedible < 5 µm fraction and large filamentous cyanobacteria. Large flagellates disappeared. The edible group was low as usual in summer and decreased with both factors due to enhanced copepod grazing and overall decline of small flagellates. Our results emphasize that the responses of summer communities are complex, but can be predicted by the composition and dominance of size classes and groups.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.939015
Related Identifier IsSupplementTo https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms9112294
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.939015
Provenance
Creator Paul, Carolin; Sommer, Ulrich; Matthiessen, Birte ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2021
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Publication Series of Datasets; Collection
Format application/zip
Size 2 datasets
Discipline Earth System Research
Spatial Coverage (10.133 LON, 54.333 LAT)
Temporal Coverage Begin 2014-08-29T00:00:00Z
Temporal Coverage End 2014-09-26T00:00:00Z