Marine Microalgae: Taxonomy, Diversity and Biogeography
A special issue of Journal of Marine Science and Engineering (ISSN 2077-1312). This special issue belongs to the section "Marine Biology".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 April 2026 | Viewed by 30
Special Issue Editors
Interests: microbial diversity; microalgae; HABs; photosynthetic organisms; molecular ecology
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Marine microalgae are foundational to ocean ecosystems and the global carbon cycle, contributing a major fraction of primary production and biogeochemical fluxes. Yet their true taxonomic breadth and spatial–temporal dynamics remain incompletely resolved, owing to cryptic diversity, plastic morphologies, and undersampling across environmental gradients. Rapid advances in integrative taxonomy, high-throughput sequencing, single-cell ‘omics, and quantitative imaging are now transforming how we delineate species, infer evolutionary relationships, and map biogeographic patterns from coastal shelves to the open ocean and across polar to tropical regimes.
This Special Issue invites studies that refine microalgal systematics and expand our view of diversity using combined morphological, molecular, and ecological evidence, including phylogenomics, metabarcoding, and environmental DNA approaches. We particularly welcome contributions that connect taxonomic resolution to functional traits and environmental niches to explain distributional ranges, endemism, and community turnover under natural variability and climate-driven change. Submissions addressing the biogeography of harmful and bloom-forming taxa, trait–environment coupling, dispersal and population structure, and mechanistic or statistical models that link observation with process are encouraged. Work leveraging remote sensing, autonomous platforms, long-term time series, and culture collections to bridge scales is of special interest, as are method papers and benchmark datasets that improve reproducibility and interoperability.
By bringing together taxonomy, diversity assessment, and biogeographic synthesis, this Special Issue aims to clarify lineage boundaries, reveal hidden diversity, and provide robust, data-driven maps of microalgal distributions that can inform ecosystem forecasting and management in a changing ocean.
Dr. Zhun Li
Dr. Jin Ho Kim
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Marine Science and Engineering is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2600 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- marine microalgae
- phytoplankton diversity
- integrative taxonomy
- phylogenomics
- metabarcoding and eDNA
- cryptic species
- biogeography
- trait-based ecology
- harmful algal blooms
- climate change
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