Understanding how species evolve in their communities is a key challenge in biology and has wide-ranging implications, from managing bacterial resistance to antibiotics to predicting changes in productivity under climate change. Except for bacteria, evolution in communities remains unexplored for most species. Living in a community can be both good and bad: co-occurring species can increase competition for resources but can also offer new opportunities not available for species in isolation. Can we predict how species traits related to energy use change over time in communities? How do these changes affect the productivity and efficiency of communities? This project explores these questions using phytoplankton as a model system. Phytoplankton plays a vital role in our oceans – not only it forms the base of marine food webs but also provides half of the world’s oxygen and carbon uptake. We will combine eco-physiological measurements of energy consumption and production with experimental evolution, leveraging new advances in phytoplankton genomics, to quantify change across three scales: genes, phenotypes and communities. With this multi-disciplinary approach, we will disentangle some of the mechanisms through which species interactions shape energy fluxes across biological scales. Furthermore, by tracking phytoplankton productivity and efficiency, we will provide new theory and data to test for changes in critical ocean functions, such as the production of oxygen and the uptake of carbon.

This project has received funding from “la Caixa” Foundation (ID 100010434) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 847648. The fellowship code is LCF/BQ/PI21/11830001.