École Nationale Supérieure de
Techniques Avancées

Abstract

Competitive exclusion tends to make the diversity within phytoplankton communities fall to 0. As a result, some others mechanisms had to supplement the theory. Kill-The-Winner and Trait Diffusion are variance-sustaining mechanisms that help sustain the diversity in the models. The model SPEAD, developed by Guillaume Le Gland (Le Gland et al. 2021), allow the user to choose the variance-sustaining mechanism he wants to use in order to model the dynamics of the phytoplankton community. The three traits are characterized by their means, variances and correlations. Diversity within the water column that we study can be quantified in different ways. Several of them are explored in the present research project. The changes that occur during summer due to ocean stratification in the traits distributions and their impact on diversity have also been analyzed.