• Energy Research

AbstractBenthic fauna refers to all fauna that live in or on the seafloor, which researchers typically divide into size classes meiobenthos (32/64 µm–0.5/1 mm), macrobenthos (250 µm–1 cm), and megabenthos (>1 cm). Benthic fauna play important roles in bioturbation activity, mineralization of organic matter, and in marine food webs. Evaluating their role in these ecosystem functions requires knowledge of their global distribution and biomass. We therefore established the BenBioDen database, the largest open-access database for marine benthic biomass and density data compiled so far. In total, it includes 11,792 georeferenced benthic biomass and 51,559 benthic density records from 384 and 600 studies, respectively. We selected all references following the procedure for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and report biomass records as grams of wet mass, dry mass, or ash-free dry mass, or carbon per m2 and as abundance records as individuals per m2. This database provides a point of reference for future studies on the distribution and biomass of benthic fauna.

Scientists, policy makers, and journalists are three key, interconnected players involved in prioritizing and implementing solutions to mitigate the consequences of anthropogenic pressures on the environment. The way in which information is framed and expertise is communicated by the media is crucial for political decisions and for the integrated management of environmental issues. Here we present a comparative study of scientific literature and press articles addressing climate change and biodiversity. We extensively scrutinized the scientific literature, research funding, and press articles from the USA, Canada, and United Kingdom addressing climate change and biodiversity issues between 1991 and 2016. We found that media coverage of climate change was up to eight times higher compared to biodiversity. This discrepancy could not be explained by different scientific output between the two issues. Moreover, climate change media coverage was often related to specific events whereas no such indication of a connection was found in the case of biodiversity. An international communication strategy is urgently required to raise public awareness on biodiversity issues. We discussed several initiatives that scientists could undertake to better communicate major discoveries to the public and policy makers.

The Northwest Atlantic is a key region with an essential role in global climate regulation, redistributing heat and influencing the carbon cycle. However, little is known about its evolution before 1950, mainly because of the lack of long-term instrumental measurements. The hard parts of long-lived marine biota hold the potential to extend instrumentally derived observation by several decades or centuries and enhance our understanding of global climate processes. Here, we investigate the effects of local, regional, and large-scale climate variability on the marine bivalve, Arctica islandica (Linnaeus, 1767) from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (SPM). This archipelago lies at the boundary zone between the cold Labrador Current in the north and the warm Gulf Stream waters to the south, an excellent site to capture changes in North Atlantic climate and oceanography. This study presents the northernmost, statistically robust A. islandica growth chronology (1850–2015) from the Western North Atlantic and its potential as an environmental proxy record for past climatic and hydrographic variabilities at different time and geographical scales. In view of our results, it seems that A. islandica shell growth anomalies in SPM are mostly controlled by local primary production. Since long term instrumental records of this environmental variable are not available; we investigate the influence of global and regional environmental phenomena on A. islandica growth and indirectly on primary productivity of archipelago waters. The chronology correlates significantly and positively with the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) and negatively with the North Atlantic Oscillation, two global climatic indices. The North Atlantic spatial pattern of correlation shows significant and positive correlations of 0–100 m temperatures from 1950 with A. islandica growth in SPM encompassing the subpolar gyre area. These global-scale relationships are refined and the mechanisms leading to them explained by comparing A. islandica growth chronology to regional environmental datasets. These relationships existing between the A. islandica shell growth record at SPM and environmental datasets covering different geographical scales could yield details about past North Atlantic basin and regional environmental conditions through their influence on SPM coastal environment.

The environments of Arctic Ocean nearshore areas experience high intra- and inter-annual variability, making it difficult to evaluate the impact of anthropogenic warming. However, a sediment record from the southern Canadian Beaufort Sea allowed us to reconstruct the impacts of climate and environmental changes over the last 1300 years along the northern Yukon coast, Canada. The coring site (PG2303; 69.513°N, 138.895°W; water depth 32 m) is located in the Herschel Basin, where high sedimentation rates (0.1–0.5 cm a−1) allowed analyses at sub-centennial to decadal resolutions. Benthic foraminiferal, ostracod, and tintinnid assemblages, as well as the stable isotope composition of the foraminifera Elphidium clavatum and Cassidulina reniforme were used as paleoclimatic and ecological indicators, while the age model was based on the combined radiometric data of 14C, 210Pb and 137Cs. From ca 700 to 1050 CE, our data suggest penetration of offshore shelf-break waters inferred by the dominance of C. reniforme followed by the relatively abundant Triloculina trihedra in the foraminiferal assemblages as both species are associated with stable saline conditions. Afterwards, the occurrence of ostracods Kotoracythere arctoborealis and Normanicythere leioderma suggests influx of Pacific-sourced waters until ca. 1150 CE. From ∼1150–1650 CE, persistent frigid waters, limited sediment supply, and low abundances of microfossils suggest cold conditions with pervasive annual sea-ice cover that may have restricted upwelling of oceanic waters. After ∼1800 CE, the co-occurrence of Tintinnopsis fimbriata and bacterial/complex organic carbon feeder foraminifera (Quinqueloculina stalkeri, Textularia earlandi and Stetsonia horvathi), suggest an increased influence of freshwater rich in particulate organic matter, which may be related to the spreading of the Mackenzie River plume and/or increased coastal permafrost erosion during longer ice-free seasons. Based on these proxy data, the shift at ∼1800 CE marks the onset of regional warming, which further intensified after ∼1955 CE, likely in response to the anthropogenic forcing.

This dataset is a component of the PAN-Arctic data collection of benthic BIOtas (PANABIO) and has been collated during the Census of Marine Life project Arctic Ocean Diversity (ArcOD; http://www.arcodiv.org/). It contains a total of 1,442 abundance and wet biomass records of 319 macro- and megabenthic taxa (species to family level) identified in 13 Agassiz trawl catches and 15 giant box corer samples taken at 28 stations located in the Beaufort Sea at water depths of 28–74 m during one cruise in 2011. The dataset is also available in a PostgreSQL-based data warehouse that can be accessed and queried through an open-access frontend web service at https://critterbase.awi.de/panabio.