Monitoring aquatic primary producers response to Climate Change: The Phytoplankton VRE

Phytoplankton, as key players in aquatic ecosystems and primary producers contributing nearly 50% of oceanic productivity, are highly sensitive to climate change. Shifts in temperature, water stratification, nutrient availability, and grazing pressure directly and indirectly influence phytoplankton dynamics, altering their structure, composition, and ecological roles. To address these complex interactions and enhance predictive capabilities, the Phytoplankton Virtual Research Environment (VRE) provides an advanced e-science platform for analyzing phytoplankton functional traits. Developed by LifeWatch Italy, the Phytoplankton VRE integrates diverse datasets using FAIR principles, semantic tools, and computational workflows. It offers web services such as the Atlas of Phytoplankton for taxonomic identification, the Atlas of Shapes for morphological characterizations, the PhytoTraits Thesaurus for standardising phytoplankton trait data and metadata, and computational services for trait analysis and size-class distributions. Future developments under the ITINERIS project will extend VRE capabilities to include physiological and environmental parameters, integrate new programming languages, and incorporate remote sensing data. These advancements aim to improve the understanding of primary producer responses to climate change and support ecological research and management.