Plankton Speciation and Adaptation in the Open Ocean
This project will focus on the question of fundamental importance for our understanding of evolution and biodiversity: how do new species originate and evolve. In particular, this project will help to unveil poorly understood evolutionary processes driving the formation of an unexpectedly high diversity of plankton species in an apparently homogenous environment of the open ocean, the so called “paradox of the plankton”. This question will be addressed by studying ecologically important marine phytoplankton species (coccolithophore Emiliania huxleyi and related species) that is highly abundant in world oceans and significantly contributes to global carbon cycle. The project benefits from complementary expertise of Prof. Filatov (Plant Sciences, Oxford), who is an expert in evolutionary genetics and genomics, and Prof. Rickaby (Earth Sciences, Oxford), who is an expert in global biogeochemical implications of marine phytoplankton.
PIs: Prof. Dmitry Filatov (Plant Sciences), Prof. Rosalind Rickaby (Earth Sciences)
Contact: Dmitry.Filatov@plants.ox.ac.uk
Associated Pages
- Featured Supervisors and available topics
- Improving fire emission estimates
- Stability and resilience of tropical vegetation transitions
- The role of pollinators in plant species diversification in the Greater Cape Floristic Region, South Africa
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- Does increased diversity cause increased predation pressure?
- Are niches smaller when there are more species? A quantitative investigation of niche partitioning over the Phanerozoic
- Disentangling the dynamics of diversification in deep time
- Infra-red effects of atmospheric cluster-ions
- The dynamics of flowing, subsurface salt sheets: observational constraints and theoretical models
- Toward a mechanistic understanding of glacial-interglacial cycles in atmospheric CO2
- Plankton Speciation and Adaptation in the Open Ocean
- Quantifying ocean heat and anthropogenic carbon uptake
- Constraining the Cycle of Natural and Anthropogenic Lead in the Ocean
- Observing the Origins of Tropical Cyclones
- Deciphering the role of drought and fire in tropical ecosystems