News from Circumpolar Biodiversity Monitoring Program

pollock The objective of the survey was to establish a baseline for the effects of oil development and climate change. Methods of research included: bottom trawls to assess distribution and abundance of benthic fish and invertebrate species; hydroacoustics and mid-water nets were used to survey pelagic fish conductivity-temperature-depth instruments collected oceanographic data; bongo nets were used to sample distribution of zooplankton.

In total, 38 fish and 174 invertebrate species were identified; 6% of the bottom-trawl catch was comprised of fish, while invertebrates made up the remaining 94%.

The four most-abundant fish species were Arctic cod, eelpouts, Bering flounder and walleye pollock; the most-abundant invertebrates were brittle stars, opilio snow crab, mollusks and seastars. The pelagic community was dominated by Arctic cod and young-of-the-year sculpin and eelblennies.

The results suggest that climate change may have resulted in range expansion by some species, such as pollock. This survey was also the first to document commercial-sized opilio snow crab in the North American Arctic.

For more information, click here. Back to top. Pollock photo: Sue Daly.

Ocean Acidification and Ocean Fertilization Reports

The impacts of ocean acidification will be seen earliest in the Arctic and the Southern oceans. Twenty-five percent of atmospheric CO2 derived from burning fossil fuels and land-use changes is absorbed by oceans where it dissolves and forms carbonic acid. As more CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, greater amounts are absorbed by the oceans and that causes significant changes to ocean chemistry and leads to progressive acidification.

Since 1992, UNEP-WCMC has been working in collaboration with the Secretariat of the Convention of Biological Diversity to prepare ocean acidification and ocean fertilization reports for peer review. It's hoped that the publication of these reports will be the catalyst that places both issues higher on the political agenda.

(The reports and will be published in late 2009. They will be available for review at the fourteenth meeting of the Subsidiary Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice in early 2010.) Back to top.

Arctic Zooplankton Research

Canada's Three Oceans (C3O) is a Canadian International Polar Year project led by Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Its purpose is to observe and monitor physical and biological change along a 15,000-kilometre transect line through the three oceans surrounding northern North America. The Arctic zooplankton biogeography study is a core part of C3O and it will document how seasonally ice-covered marine ecosystems respond to a warming ocean, and will enable data-based prediction of the impacts of these responses on higher trophic-level organisms and the carbon cycle. The zooplankton-biogeography group (ZBG) is tracking how the Arctic Ocean zooplankton community responds to climate forcing, that has the potential to profoundly affect Arctic marine food-webs, from zooplantkon all the way up to humans.

The ZBG has been analysing the species composition of several hundred zooplankton samples collected in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans since 2000. This analysis includes careful examination for the establishment of southern (invasive) species in Arctic waters, and for trends in the relative abundance of endemic Arctic species.

ZBG is using molecular genetic analysis to track northward expansion of a Bering Sea sub-population of the Arctic copepod Calanus glacialis. A relatively small alteration in oceanic conditions in the Arctic could result in a northward range expansion of this sub-population and signal ecological change long before conditions are conducive for the reproduction of a Pacific endemic species within the Arctic basin. Back to top.

2009 Biodiversity Surveys in the Bering and Chukchi Seas

During 2009, NOAA conducted two special marine-biodiversity science activities. The NOAA UAS Program supported a set of field tests of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) to determine its effectiveness for surveying the sub-Arctic pack ice for ribbon, spotted, bearded and ringed seals (collectively called ice seals). The tests were conducted as part of a research cruise by the National Marine Fisheries Service (Alaska Fisheries Science Center) in the eastern Bering Sea from May 13 to June 11, 2009, aboard the NOAA ship McArthur II.

The UAS used in these tests was the Boeing ScanEagle, owned and operated by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. This platform was specifically designed for launching from, and recovery by, a ship at sea.

During surveys, the UAS typically carried a digital SLR camera (Nikon D300) in a belly module component of the aircraft body, although some flights were also conducted with an integrated E/O video camera that was controlled from the ground station. Once on site in the Bering Sea, 10 UAS flights were conducted at the edge of Bering Sea ice between May 21 and June 8, 2009. The digital SLR camera payload (D300) was carried on eight of these flights and collected over 25,000 images of sea ice.

These images are currently being analyzed for the presence of ice seals. Overall, the ScanEagle performed well in a variety of weather conditions, and the images collected have the necessary resolution to distinguish the different species, ages, and occasionally, even genders of ice seals. For more information, click here.

The second of the biodiversity science activities was a multi-disciplinary research cruise under the Russia-USA Long-term Census of the Arctic (RUSALCA) project that observes physical environmental changes in the Northern Bering and Chukchi seas and to evaluate ecological impact of these changes.

To provide the next point in an observational timeline, the summer 2009 cruise team repeated sampling conducted in summer 2004. Permanent moorings in the Bering Strait provided information on environmental changes between the major field operations.

The work was conducted in close co-operation with Russian science agencies and the Russian Navy, and observations were taken in U.S., Russian, and international territory. (Data are shared between the U.S. and Russia.)

Surveys were conducted of zoo- and icthyo-plankton, juvenile and adult fishes, benthic biota and marine mammals. Biodiversity results will be compared with physical and biochemical characteristics of the various water masses.

An upcoming special issue of Deep Sea Research will highlight biodiversity results from the first RUSALCA cruise in 2004. A post-cruise results meeting will be held in late 2010.

This work is a U.S. contribution to the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme's Arctic climate monitoring and impact assessment objectives, as well as to the marine-biodiversity objectives of the CBMP. Back to top.