The role of functional traits and trade‐offs in structuring phytoplankton communities: scaling from cellular to ecosystem level

Trait-based approaches to community structure are increasingly used in terrestrial ecology. We show that such an approach, augmented by a mechanistic analysis of trade-offs among functional traits, can be successfully used to explain community composition of marine phytoplankton along environmental gradients. Our analysis of literature on major functional traits in phytoplankton, such as parameters of nutrient-dependent growth and uptake,...