0000000001328790
AUTHOR
Julian Gutt
Biogeographic Atlas of the Southern Ocean.
498 pages; International audience; The Southern Ocean waters to the west of the Antarctic Peninsula are warming faster than almost any other place on Earth. This area of most rapid environmental change was among others targeted by the Census of Antarctic Marine Life in its collection of biogeographic information. Such biogeographic information is of fundamental importance for monitoring biodiversity, discovering biodiversity hotspots, defining ecoregions and detecting the impacts of environmental changes. It is the preliminary and necessary step in designing marine protected areas in a changing ocean. At the end of five years of extensive biodiversity exploration and assessment by CAML (www…
Biodiversity change after climate-induced ice-shelf collapse in the Antarctic
Julian Gutt ... et al. -- 10 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, supplementary data https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dsr2.2010.05.024
Physical oceanography, sea-bed photographs and videos of benthos from the Weddell Sea taken with remote operated vehicle CHEROKEE during POLARSTERN cruise ANT-XXIII/8
The marine ecosystem on the eastern shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula was surveyed 5 and 12 years after the climate-induced collapse of the Larsen A and B ice shelves. An impoverished benthic fauna was discovered, that included deep-sea species presumed to be remnants from ice-covered conditions. The current structure of various ecosystem components appears to result from extremely different response rates to the change from an oligotrophic sub-ice-shelf ecosystem to a productive shelf ecosystem. Meiobenthic communities remained impoverished only inside the embayments. On local scales, macro- and mega-epibenthic diversity was generally low, with pioneer species and typical Antarctic megabent…