A big step towards understanding the biodiversity of Arctic meiofauna
For the last four years, Joel Vikberg Wernström has committed his time as a doctoral researcher towards processing and analysing meiofauna (tiny, sediment-dwelling animals) found in sediment collected in the Barents Sea. The research effort, spearheaded by the Norwegian-led Nansen Legacy project, was highly collaborative and built on the expertise of colleagues in other Nordic and European countries. Unprecedented in its scale and detail, the results of this project were recently published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
Marine meiofauna are small invertebrates that typically live in sediments on the seafloor. From a biodiversity standpoint, they are extremely poorly documented, and we know little about what affects their numbers and distributions. However, we do know that meiofauna affect other parts of the ecosystem, and gaining more knowledge about them is urgently needed in the face of forecasted climate-driven changes in Arctic ecosystems. Therefore, they were included in the scope of the Nansen Legacy project, a comprehensive Norwegian research effort.
Never before has a project on meiofauna in the Arctic been carried out with sampling spanning this many locations and times of the year. In the resulting study, the biodiversity of meiofauna at four different stations (two on the Barents Sea shelf, one on the continental slope, and one in the Nansen Basin) is described for four months of the year. Additionally, statistical analyses are presented which show that physical differences between the habitats such as depth, grain size and food levels are very important for shaping the meiofauna communities. Additionally, seasonality appears to play a minor part in affecting the number of animals found on the seafloor.
"With this paper, we contribute a really unique dataset. It will be a baseline for benthic ecologists working in the area for years to come", says Joel Vikberg Wernström, a PhD Fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and lead author of the study. The openly accessible research article can be read here: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.72777.
For more information about this project or the UArctic Thematic Network on Arctic Marine Biodiversity, please contact:
Andreas Altenburger, andreas.altenburger@uit.no
Joel Vikberg Wernström, joel.v.wernstrom@uit.no
Photo: Joel Vikberg Wernström (left) is a biologist, PhD Fellow at UiT and lead author on the new paper on meiofauna biodiversity. Sampling was done from the Norwegian ship R/V Kronprins Haakon (middle). Meiofauna specimens (right) were plentiful in the samples and we now know much more about the factors which shape their communities in the Barents Sea.