Harnessing Functional Traits to Advance Seaweed EcologyMacroalgal Traits

John Griffin¹

¹Swansea University, UK

Traits are fundamental to ecology, shaping how organisms interact with their environments and determining species’ vulnerabilities to environmental change. Across primary producers, from plankton to plants, researchers are increasingly shifting away from reliance on coarse grouping schemes—often criticised for their lack of flexibility and explanatory power—towards multiple quantitative traits that more transparently characterise an organism’s functional ecology. For seaweeds, traditional morpho-functional grouping schemes remain dominant, but the use of multiple directly measured traits is gaining traction, offering substantial potential to advance seaweed and temperate reef ecology. In this contribution, I will highlight the utility of modern trait-based approaches in seaweed research and propose a vision for their future development. I will showcase recent findings that demonstrate how traits can reveal species’ unique functional roles, facilitate the analysis of shifts in community functional structure, and enable tracking of changes across environmental gradients. Finally, I will present a vision for standardised methods and a coordinated global initiative to screen and share seaweed traits, inviting collaboration from the ITRS community to fully realise the potential of traits for understanding and managing temperate reef ecosystems.