Environmental change in the Arctic Ocean: a synthesis and retrospective analysis of zooplankton communities

Funds are provided to determine how arctic zooplankton communities have varied over interannual to decadal periods, from regional to panarctic scales. The PI states the specific hypotheses that zooplankton biomass may be increasing, due to environmental changes, and that the prevalence of the dominant copepod in deeper waters, Calanus hyperboreus, may be eroded by smaller congeneric species. He will assess the validity of this hypothesis by (1) filling the regional data gap over the Canada Basin through analysis of zooplankton samples collected or to be collected by the himself between 2002-2011; (2) assembling available zooplankton and environmental data throughout the Arctic into a single data portal for a GIS-based and spatially explicit modeling of community structures, species abundances, biomass, and distributions; and (3) rescuing precious older ?unpublished? data sets and grey literature worldwide, many of which he has already assembled or will have full access to, that will strengthen and extend his modeling efforts back more than 50 years.