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Updated: Jul 23, 2026

Automatic Image Processing to Determine the Community Size Structure of Riverine Macroinvertebrates
Published on: January 13, 2023
Abiotic forcing of plankton evolution in the Cenozoic
Daniela N Schmidt1, Hans R Thierstein, Jörg Bollmann
1Department of Earth Sciences, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich, and University of Zürich, ETH-Zentrum, CH-8092 Zürich, Switzerland. d.schmidt@gl.rhul.ac.uk
Abstract:
We characterize the evolutionary radiation of planktic foraminifera by the test size distributions of entire assemblages in more than 500 Cenozoic marine sediment samples, including more than 1 million tests. Calibration of Holocene size patterns with environmental parameters and comparisons with Cenozoic paleoproxy data show a consistently positive correlation between test size and surface-water stratification intensity. We infer that the observed macroevolutionary increase in test size of planktic foraminifera through the Cenozoic was an adaptive response to intensifying surface-water stratification in low latitudes, which was driven by polar cooling.
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