Seminar by Dr. Hyo-Jeong Kim from Yonsei University
17 November 2026
KST 10:00
The Seminar is being held in Room 1010 (Jasmin) – Integrated mechanical engineering building. Click here for the campus map.
Phytoplankton form the foundation of the marine food web and play a central role in the global carbon cycle. Their diverse morphological, genetic, physiological, and ecological traits contribute to the diversity and functioning of marine phytoplankton communities. While species diversity provides an important measure of community structure, a trait-based perspective can reveal functional characteristics of communities and responses to environmental change that may not be captured by species diversity alone. Given that phytoplankton diversity is difficult to observe comprehensively across the global ocean, modeling provides a useful framework for examining trait diversity and its dynamics. The MITgcm–Darwin physical–biogeochemical model explicitly represents phytoplankton communities with distinct traits—including cell size, functional roles, and temperature preferences—providing an opportunity to investigate climate impacts on trait diversity at the global scale. Examples of applications of this model to climate forcing, including global warming and marine heatwaves, will be discussed, showing that responses of individual taxa to environmental change are strongly trait-dependent. These examples demonstrate how trait-based representations of marine ecosystems can sharpen our mechanistic understanding of climate–ecosystem interactions.