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Community assembly: perspectives from phytoplankton’s studies

  • COLIN S. REYNOLDS’ LEGACY
  • Review Paper
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Abstract

Community assembly (CA) is a topic of growing interest in ecology due to global change, among other reasons. A review of the latter 20 years in plankton CA studies suggests some advancements and drawbacks. Most works deal with groups of same trophic level species and overlook food webs, except the proposal of the PEG model. Phytoplankton has focused the most on theoretical grounds of CA: (i) to find species associations and establish their templates (condition and resource matrices) in order to define assembly rules, (ii) to set the main assembling mechanisms arising from mean-trait studies and environmental constraints, and (iii) to debate on the predictable ability of that view. After the last decade of advancements, CA future will certainly foster not only by considering classical ecological mechanisms (abiotic selection, biotic interactions, history), but also by including evolutionary and metacommunity (i.e. regional) processes. Massive DNA metabarcoding of taxa, incorporation of novel traits (such as the proportional growth rate), consideration of non-dominant species and experimentation on templates and trajectories will certainly tune up and widen our view of CA, a topic very earlier tackled successfully by Colin Reynolds.

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Ackowledgements

I thank Miguel Álvarez-Cobelas who (i) introduced me to the world of phytoplankton and introduced me to Colin Reynolds; (ii) helped me with this manuscript by searching for hard-to-obtain literature (Judith Padisák also helped me with this task); and (iii) read the drafts and gave me his invaluable critical opinion. Reviewers and editors have also contributed to improve this manuscript. And last but not least, I thank Colin Reynolds for opening and addressing hot topics in community ecology in so many ways.

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  1. Cavanilles Institute of Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology (University of Valencia), c/ Catedrático José Beltrán 2, 46980, Valencia, Spain

    Carmen Rojo

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Judit Padisák, J. Alex Elliott, Martin T. Dokulil & Luigi Naselli-Flores / New, old and evergreen frontiers in freshwater phytoplankton ecology: the legacy of Colin S. Reynolds

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Rojo, C. Community assembly: perspectives from phytoplankton’s studies. Hydrobiologia 848, 31–52 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04249-3

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