Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Albuquerque 2001

SS30 Climate Change Impacts in the Arctic: Ecosystems and Societies (Science and Society Connections)

Date: Wednesday, February 14, 2001, Time: 2:30:00 PM

Location: Ruidoso/Pecos

Dunton, K, H, UT Marine Science Institute, Port Aransas, USA, dunton@utmsi.utexas.edu

Grebmeier, J, M, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA, jgreb@utkux.utk.edu

Maidment, D, M, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA, maidment@mail.utexas.edu

Jonsdottír, J, F, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA,

Schonberg, S, V, UT Marine Science Institute, Port Aransas, USA, susans@utmsi.utexas.edu

ARCTIC BENTHIC BIOTA: LINKS TO GLOBAL CHANGE

A geospatial database was designed and constructed from NODC and other data sources to analyze the benthic community in the western Arctic Ocean as a tool to measure potential global change impacts on the arctic ecosystem. Benthic biomass data were assembled into a relational database and analyzed in ArcView and Arc/Info and interpolated using kriging techniques. Plotted benthic data reveal areas of high biomass (>250 g/m2) north of the Bering Strait in the Chukchi Sea and south of the Bering Strait in Gulf of Anadyr waters. In contrast, benthic biomass along the nearshore Alaskan Beaufort Sea shelf is less than 30 g/m2 except along the nearshore regions of the western Beaufort and east of the Mackenzie River delta. The high benthic biomass in the Bering-Chukchi parallels the abundance of benthic feeding marine mammals in this region in comparison to the Beaufort Sea. We are conducting further studies to examine the linkages between chlorophyll standing stocks and the productivity of overlying shelf waters with the physical forcing processes that regulate the advection of carbon to these benthic communities.

This Session Listing

Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Albuquerque 2001

Quicklinks