Chesapeake Bay and Baltic Sea phytoplankton sample metadata

We analyze the relationship between species richness, salinity and resource use efficiency from 10712 summer (June to September) surface phytoplankton samples from the Chesapeake Bay (n=3967) and the Baltic Sea (n=6745). As sample species richness (alpha diversity) has a U-shape distribution along an estuarine salinity gradient and species richness is known to scale with resource use efficiency – an important ecosystem function, we hypothesized that the ecosystem function can be predicted from salinity.