Marine Microalgae: Taxonomy, Diversity and Biogeography

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

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