Community composition and coexistence: The effects of temporal variation and environmental forcing on community trait distributions and diversity.

摘要

Community ecology is complicated and difficult, but global climate change and massive biodiversity loss makes it imperative that we strive toward a coherent understanding of the processes that guide community assembly and structure. In this dissertation I look at how communities are assembled and diversity is maintained in the phytoplankton through both data-driven and theoretical methods, using a trait-based approach to understand the mechanistic basis of community structure and diversity. The first chapter asks what environmental factors drive the distribution of a crucial trait, cell size across a broad spatial scale. The theory chapters are concerned with the role of environmental variation in maintaining diversity. In all, I highlight the importance of temporal variation in shaping the function of communities.