Phytoplankton diversity is essential to understand the dynamics of marine ecosystems, global biogeochemical cycles and impacts of climate change. However, changes in phytoplankton communities are complex and occur at different time-scales, from daily to decadal, thus making our understanding of the environmental processes driving them more difficult. Here, I focus on the morphological diversity; the individual morphological characteristics influencing the evolutionary success of organisms and the functioning of ecosystems, regardless of their taxonomic classification. I use high-resolution plankton imagery generated by an Imaging FlowCytobot deployed in Narragansett Bay, United States, to detect the main morphological features of the local phytoplankton community, along with their seasonality and periodicities. I show that morphological analysis can uncover successions of communities and demonstrate significant changes with a 27.5 day and 24-hour periodicity related to the moon apogee-perigee cycle and the diel cycle.
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