Emergence of a resource acquisition tradeoff at the community scale during environmental change

Biomass-weighted mean traits of a community’s constituent species are a useful tool to assess environmental filtering in community function in response to environmental change. We show that annually averaged phytoplankton community function, expressed by the community mean traits phosphate and light affinity, responded strongly and reversibly to long-term changes in nutrient supply over a 42-year period of eutrophication and re-oligotrophication of Lake Constance. Within the lake’s species pool, phosphate and light affinities were weakly negatively correlated, suggesting a weak physiological tradeoff. Yet, a strong tradeoff between these traits emerged when species were weighted by their biomass, suggesting species sorting along the tradeoff line across years of shifting nutrient status. Emergent tradeoffs, i.e. tradeoffs that become apparent first when trait combinations are weighted by the contributions of the trait-bearing organisms to community biomass, may be a useful, novel concep..., , , # Emergence of a resource acquisition tradeoff at the community scale during environmental change

Emergence of a resource acquisition tradeoff at the community scale during environmental change: By Anton Pranger, Frank Peeters, Nathalie Wagner, Sebastian Diehl, and Dietmar Straile. To be published in Ecology Letters (expected in 2025)

**Description of the data and file structure**

Phytoplankton and phosphorus data were provided by the IGKB (Internationale Gewässerschutzkommission für den Bodensee, EN: International Water Protection Committee for Lake Constance).

This repository contains annual mean data derived from raw data. Namely:

* Annual mean relative biovolume of taxa found in Lake Constance (annual_mean_relative_biovolume.txt)
* Columns are years, rows are classes (unitless)
* Annual mean biovolume (annual_mean_biovolume.txt)
* Vector of annual mean biovolume (μL L^-1)
* Total phosphorus concentration during winter mixis (TPmix.txt)
* Vector of total phosphorus concent...