Back

A diverse community constitutes global coccolithophore calcium carbonate stocks

de Vries, J.; Monteiro, F. M.; Poulton, A. J.; Wiseman, N. A.; Wolf, L. J.

2025-09-16 ecology
10.1101/2025.09.11.675535 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Coccolithophores are key marine plankton contributing to the global ocean carbon cycle through calcium carbonate production. Most studies focus on Gephyrocapsa huxleyi, a globally abundant but lightly calcified species, potentially misrepresenting coccolithophore biogeochemistry. Combining new observations with species-resolved machine learning, we map global distributions and carbon stocks of the most abundant coccolithophore species. We estimate a total inorganic carbon stock of 10.3 [3.8, 20.1] Tg C. G. huxleyi accounts for only {approx} 7.2 % of this stock, while more heavily calcified species, Florisphaera profunda, Calcidiscus leptoporus and Coccolithus pelagicus, dominate. Furthermore, 13 species are required to constrain 80 % of stocks. Our findings demonstrate a diverse community constitutes coccolithophore stocks and that a focus on G. huxleyi misrepresents the role of coccolithophores in the carbon cycle.

Matching journals

The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.