Phytoplankton are photosynthetic protists, ubiquitous in
earth’s aqueous environments. They account for roughly half of
earth’s net primary production (
Field et al., 1998), and as oxygenic
photosynthesizers, they all contain chlorophyll-
a
. Accordingly,
the distribution of phytoplankton in space and time is often
studied using satellite-derived or
in situ
measurements of
chlorophyll-a
as a proxy for biomass. However, there are tens of
thousands of species of phytoplankton, comprising at least eight
major divisions or phyla (
Falkowski et al., 2004
), thus these
diverse organisms are united not by genetic relatedness, but by
their shared habitat