Traits, Rates, and Fates of Plankton: New Views from Automated Cytometry and Imaging

This is an exciting era to be a plankton ecologist. The pace of discovery is accelerating as we now have the observational strategies to quantify shifts in ecological phenomena such as population dynamics, phenology, and community structure. This in turn opens the door to connect these shifts to changes in environmental factors such as climate-related warming and biogeochemical implications including on productivity. The growing use of high-resolution automated cytometric and imaging approaches has transformed our access to information at spatial scales that range from individual microscopic organisms to ocean basins and over temporal scales from minutes to decades. Even more, these observations can resolve morphological, taxonomic, and other aspects of diversity and interactions between microscopic organisms. Strategically implementing these approaches is bringing into focus some surprises about such fundamental topics as how taxon-specific blooms are regulated and how food webs are structured.