Major restructuring of marine plankton assemblages under global warming

Fabio Benedetti (), Meike Vogt, Urs Hofmann Elizondo, Damiano Righetti, Niklaus E. Zimmermann and Nicolas Gruber
Additional contact information
Fabio Benedetti: Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zürich
Meike Vogt: Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zürich
Urs Hofmann Elizondo: Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zürich
Damiano Righetti: Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zürich
Niklaus E. Zimmermann: Swiss Federal Research Institute WSL
Nicolas Gruber: Institute of Biogeochemistry and Pollutant Dynamics, ETH Zürich

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-15

Abstract: Abstract Marine phytoplankton and zooplankton form the basis of the ocean’s food-web, yet the impacts of climate change on their biodiversity are poorly understood. Here, we use an ensemble of species distribution models for a total of 336 phytoplankton and 524 zooplankton species to determine their present and future habitat suitability patterns. For the end of this century, under a high emission scenario, we find an overall increase in plankton species richness driven by ocean warming, and a poleward shift of the species’ distributions at a median speed of 35 km/decade. Phytoplankton species richness is projected to increase by more than 16% over most regions except for the Arctic Ocean. In contrast, zooplankton richness is projected to slightly decline in the tropics, but to increase strongly in temperate to subpolar latitudes. In these latitudes, nearly 40% of the phytoplankton and zooplankton assemblages are replaced by poleward shifting species. This implies that climate change threatens the contribution of plankton communities to plankton-mediated ecosystem services such as biological carbon sequestration.

Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-25385-x Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-25385-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-25385-x

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().