Predicting Winners and Losers in a Warming Arctic

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By fisheries.noaa.gov

Habitat for key prey species may shrink dramatically if climate change continues on its current trajectory, new research shows.

NOAA FIsheries, A basket star on the Alaska seafloor. Credit: NOAA Fisheries.
NOAA FIsheries, A basket star on the Alaska seafloor. Credit: NOAA Fisheries.

By the end of this century, Arctic ocean bottom temperatures may be too warm for most seafloor-dwelling invertebrates that currently reside there, a new study finds. Potential “losers” include snails, mussels, and other animals that are important prey for valuable commercial fish species and marine mammals such as Pacific walrus. Arctic coastal communities also depend heavily on the arctic marine ecosystem for subsistence.

Seafloor Invertebrate, Snails, mussels, crabs, and sea stars are among the invertebrates that live on the arctic seafloor. Credit: NOAA Fisheries
Seafloor Invertebrate, Snails, mussels, crabs, and sea stars are among the invertebrates that live on the arctic seafloor. Credit: NOAA Fisheries

NOAA Fisheries is working with our partners to understand how climate change is transforming arctic marine ecosystems. Our goal is to help the fisheries and communities that are part of them to prepare for the future. This new collaborative study is the first to look at climate change impacts on the entire suite of arctic seafloor invertebrates. An international team of scientists combined biological and climatological data to project how the thermal habitat available to these animals could change over time.

“Our models predict major changes in the seafloor invertebrate fauna that could reverberate through the whole arctic food web,” said study leader Libby Logerwell, NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center. “If warming continues, it is potentially going to make it very difficult for a lot of invertebrates to live there—and for the birds, mammals and humans that rely on them.”

Map of the Bering and Chukchi Sea study area showing prevailing currents and some western Alaska coastal communities.
Map of the Bering and Chukchi Sea study area showing prevailing currents and some western Alaska coastal communities.

Partnerships Combine Capabilities to Predict Ecosystem Change

The research was a collaborative effort that brought together the biological and climatological expertise needed to understand ecosystem change in the Arctic. Research partners included:

  1. NOAA Fisheries Alaska Fisheries Science Center
  2. NOAA Research’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory
  3. University of Washington
  4. Institute of Marine Research in Norway

“I learned so much working with Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory’s Muyin Wang. I’m a biologist; she’s an atmospheric scientist and climatologist,” Logerwell said. “It was exciting to find out that you could project warming so far. It was sobering to see how much warming is predicted.”

“I was really excited when Libby talked to me about starting this project together,” Wang said. “As a climate scientist, I am also interested in how the changing Arctic climate would impact the components of the ecosystem. This project demonstrated a powerful tool we have to examine that—climate model projections at regional scales.”

Read more at fisheries.noaa.gov

Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa, CC BY 2.0 ,basketstarimage via Wikimedia Commons
Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa, CC BY 2.0 ,basketstarimage