Arctic oceans are undergoing major changes in many of its fundamental physical constituents. Such changes have profound impacts on the chemical and biological processes that are at the root of Arctic marine food webs. Yet, for Arctic benthic systems such syntheses are lacking. Consequently, the main objectives were to determine interactions between sea-ice associated species in benthic communities of the Arctic oceans, using joint species distribution models; link traits to environmental characteristics, using trait-based distribution models; look for indirect interactions and feedbacks between benthic fauna and ecosystem functioning with structural equation models.
Milestones and deliverables were mostly achieved, but statistical modelling approaches have not been finalised yet due to a lack of data. To address this critical gap, I initiated a pan-Arctic information system on benthic biota (PANABIO). Currently it contains >10000 sampling locations, >2500 taxonomic units, >70000 records from the period 1800-2014. We will exploit PANABIO as an open-access webservice that allows on-the-fly exploration of geo-referenced and validated circumpolar benthic biodiversity data. What we are currently investing in, is hosting associated environmental data, species traits, pipelines to molecular-genetic and taxonomic databases, as well as data repositories.
Since polar research was a new field of research for me, I heavily invested in workshops, meetings, and international symposia to establish a new scientific network and solidify my career switch. I am now involved in the Arctic traits project (University of Vienna, Austria), I supervised two BSc-students (University of Oldenburg, Germany) on polar modelling, I supervise a MSc-student from the POMOR-research school (St. Petersburg, Russia) to model regions of common species profiles in the Laptev Sea, and I co-supervise a PhD-student in a joint Russian-German multidisciplinary project focused on the Siberian Arctic (University of Kiel, Germany). Lastly, I am part of an international writing team for the H2020 call "LC-CLA-07-2019: The changing cryosphere".
A paper related to objective 2 has been published in Ecological Indicators. Lastly, I won a postdoc-grant to continue this research and create a unique and independent research-profile at the crossroads between statistical modelling and polar marine research.
