ECOTIP has integrated existing data with new observations and trait-based models, with time scales ranging from paleo-oceanography to new sampling along environmental gradients and to laboratory observations documenting short-term changes. The geographic focus areas include east and west Greenland and Barents Sea. A major observational activity has been two interdisciplinary project cruises to east and west Greenland that combined measurements of water chemistry, plankton and microbial diversity and production, sedimentation rates and benthic productivity, as well as collected paleo-oceanographic samples to compliment previous cores. These cruises provided documentation of biodiversity changes along onshore-offshore and south-north transects, and new understanding of the processes such as biological carbon pump, pelagic-benthic coupling, food-web efficiency and the distribution changes of species. These biological observations have been combined with Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) that has confirmed the biodiversity changes identified in biological data. The new insights and data have been used to develop the trait-based models in ECOTIP, which have e.g. provided projections on future fish distributions.
Some of the highlights of ECOTIP results include:
• Integration of paleo-oceanographical observations and present-day data. Besides providing a stronger basis for evaluating species responses to climate change, this has initiated research into new paleo-proxy in the form of lipid markers from copepods - sensitive indicators of climate change.
• Combining new insights of the traits of Arctic organisms from bacteria to fish, their role in ecosystem functions and response to environmental change with different modelling approaches. Better understanding of the link between functional biodiversity and biological carbon pump, lipid dynamics and benthic-pelagic coupling has provided new quantification and predictions on fish distributions, food-web productivity and carbon sequestration. A result of immediate interest is the prediction of fisheries production away from demersal fisheries that are prevalent in Greenland waters today, to fisheries production dominated by pelagic species. The modelling frameworks developed in ECOTIP are forming the basis for a better integration of biological observations and processes into earth system models.
• Integration of historical scientific data, trait-based modelling, process studies and Local Ecological Knowledge (LEK) to understand the changes in East Greenland ecosystem and its consequences for human populations. The distribution of fish and marine mammals in east Greenland has changed, with more southern species coming in and ice-dependent species receding. These changes observed in scientific data were largely confirmed by LEK interviews and used to develop a trait-based model predicting the future production of demersal vs. pelagic fish stocks in the area.
• Identification of ecological tipping points / regime shifts in different systems. ECOTIP research has identified substantial changes in East Greenland ecosystem due to shifting distribution of species and predicted substantial consequences of the changes in primary production for the overwintering of Calanus spp., the main prey item of most juvenile fish and an important agent for active carbon transport into the ocean’s interior.
• ECOTIP data on non-indigenous species (NIS), eDNA as well as Arctic food web structure and carbon sequestration have been used to develop monitoring initiatives in the Arctic and have contributed to the development of the distributed biological observatories (DBOs) and Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) for the Arctic.
• Socio-economic research in ECOTIP has provided new insights into the fisheries economy, such as demonstrating that part of the Greenlandic population is living on a mixed economy. Specifically, subsistence fishing and hunting, together with commercial fishing as a cash generator is a common and indeed a preferred lifestyle. In this traditional socio-economic setting, self-caught food would be costly to replace and plays an important role in terms of local food security.
