Abstract Relationships between the functional traits of phytoplankton and environmental factors remain insufficiently explored. However, these dependencies could be very useful for trait-based ecological modelling of phytoplankton communities. The purpose of this study is to estimate possible connections between nutrient utilization traits of marine phytoplankton, cell volume, temperature of the experiment, irradiance and taxonomic category of the species collected in Ecological Archives E096–202 ( Edwards et al., 2015 ). The search for patterns was made using the author's technique of polynomial multilayered neural network (NN) building. The optimal set of neurons' connections with the preceding layer of the network was obtained by means of a genetic algorithm run for each neuron. This approach gave good results given the sparse data sets and small samples. Categorical predictor “taxonomic group” was parameterized by an integer. We found approximations for maximal uptake and growth rates, half-saturation constants, maximum and minimum nutrients quotas as nonlinear functions of cell volume, taxon number, temperature and irradiance. Mean-square errors were lower than the errors in respective relationships to the cell volume only. These functions were used to fill in the gaps in the ecological archive. Verification of the obtained relationships was performed using an energy balance model and new data on nutrient utilization traits not used for their estimation.

中文翻译：

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浮游植物养分利用性状与环境因子的非线性关系

摘要 浮游植物的功能性状与环境因素之间的关系尚未得到充分探索。然而，这些依赖性对于浮游植物群落的基于特征的生态建模可能非常有用。本研究的目的是估计海洋浮游植物的养分利用性状、细胞体积、实验温度、辐照度和生态档案 E096-202 中收集的物种分类学类别之间可能的联系（爱德华兹等，2015）。模式搜索是使用作者的多项式多层神经网络 (NN) 构建技术进行的。神经元与网络前一层的最佳连接集是通过为每个神经元运行的遗传算法获得的。鉴于稀疏数据集和小样本，这种方法给出了很好的结果。分类预测器“分类组”由一个整数参数化。我们发现了最大吸收和生长速率、半饱和常数、最大和最小营养配额的近似值作为细胞体积、分类群数量、温度和辐照度的非线性函数。均方误差低于仅与细胞体积相关的误差。这些功能被用来填补生态档案的空白。使用能量平衡模型和未用于估计的营养利用性状的新数据对获得的关系进行了验证。半饱和常数、最大和最小营养配额作为细胞体积、分类群数量、温度和辐照度的非线性函数。均方误差低于仅与细胞体积相关的误差。这些功能被用来填补生态档案的空白。使用能量平衡模型和未用于估计的营养利用性状的新数据对获得的关系进行了验证。半饱和常数、最大和最小营养配额作为细胞体积、分类群数量、温度和辐照度的非线性函数。均方误差低于仅与细胞体积相关的误差。这些功能被用来填补生态档案的空白。使用能量平衡模型和未用于估计的营养利用性状的新数据对获得的关系进行了验证。