Community assembly: perspectives from phytoplankton's studies

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.

Automated summary

The study of plankton community assembly has mainly focused on phytoplankton, aiming to find species associations, establish templates, and discuss assembly mechanisms. Future research will need to consider classical ecological mechanisms, as well as evolutionary and metacommunity processes to further advance our understanding of community assembly.