Search results for "polar region"
showing 4 items of 4 documents
APPLICATION OF UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES FOR GLACIER RESEARCH IN THE ARCTIC AND ANTARCTIC
2019
Unmanned aerial vehicles or drones are nowadays widely used in a broad field of scientific and commercial applications. Despite this, it is quite a new method for glacier mapping in polar regions and has a lot of advantages, as well as disadvantages over more classical remote sensing instruments. Here we examine the main issues associated with the application of drones for glacier research from our experience in Iceland, Greenland and the Antarctic. We use DJI Phantom series drones for the obtaining of aerial photographs and produce digital surface models (resolution of 8 – 16 cm) and orthomosaics (resolution of 2 – 4 cm) for glacier mapping. Several issues related to the ground control poi…
Pole-to-Pole Connections : Similarities between Arctic and Antarctic Microbiomes and Their Vulnerability to Environmental Change
2017
The global biogeography of microorganisms remains poorly resolved, which limits the current understanding of microbial resilience toward environmental changes. Using high-throughput 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, we characterized the microbial diversity of terrestrial and lacustrine biofilms from the Arctic, Antarctic and temperate regions. Our analyses suggest that bacterial community compositions at the poles are more similar to each other than they are to geographically closer temperate habitats, with 32% of all operational taxonomic units (OTUs) co-occurring in both polar regions. While specific microbial taxa were confined to distinct regions, representing potentially endemic popul…
Expanding Acutuncus : Phylogenetics and morphological analyses reveal a considerably wider distribution for this tardigrade genus
2023
The tardigrade genus Acutuncus has been long thought to be an Antarctic endemism, well adapted to this harsh environment. The Antarctic endemicity of Acutuncus was recently dispelled with the description of Acutuncus mariae Zawierucha, 2020 found in the Svalbard archipelago. The integrated analyses on two newly found Acutuncus populations from UK and Italy, and a population of Acutuncus antarcticus found close to its type locality allowed us to expand the climatic and geographic range of the genus Acutuncus. These findings also allowed us to re-evaluate the morphological diagnoses of Acutuncus and accommodate it in the newly proposed monotypic family Acutuncidae fam. nov. Two new Acutuncus …
Pole-to-Pole Connections: Similarities between Arctic and Antarctic Microbiomes and Their Vulnerability to Environmental Change
2017
The global biogeography of microorganisms remains poorly resolved, which limits the current understanding of microbial resilience toward environmental changes. Using high-throughput 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, we characterized the microbial diversity of terrestrial and lacustrine biofilms from the Arctic, Antarctic and temperate regions. Our analyses suggest that bacterial community compositions at the poles are more similar to each other than they are to geographically closer temperate habitats, with 32% of all operational taxonomic units (OTUs) co-occurring in both polar regions. While specific microbial taxa were confined to distinct regions, representing potentially endemic popul…