Initial conditions and plankton groups
We used the same initial conditions as in Serra-Pompei et al. (2020; i.e., 1 μg N L−1 for the nitrogen and 5 μgC L−1 for each plankton size class (protists and copepods). We included 14 size classes of protists ranging from 10−7 μg C to 10−1 μg C mass per cell. The size of adult copepods ranged from 0.2 μg C to 1000 μg C and 0.2 μg C to 5 μg C for active and passive copepod feeders, respectively. The model had 8 temperature norms from 0 ˚C to 28 ˚C with a 4 ˚C interval. Each temperature norm included 25 populations (14 protists, eight active, and three passive copepod feeders). In total, the model included 200 populations: 112 protists, 64 active and 24 passive copepods. We also categorized the plankton biomass in size bins based on protists and copepods’ cell/body volume (six for protists and active copepods, four for passive copepod feeders, Table SM1). We used the Shannon Diversity Index to estimate the functional diversity of the modelled plankton community (Supplementary Materials).