Community composition of epipelagic zooplankton in the Eurasian Basin 2017 determined by ZooScan image analysis
The Arctic Ocean is especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warmer ocean temperatures and reduced sea ice coverage lead to a poleward shift of communities in the Arctic Ocean. This process, termed borealization, is considerably changing Arctic marine food web structure with implicati...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | unknown |
| Published: |
University of Hamburg
2020
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/52368/ https://epic.awi.de/id/eprint/52368/1/BA_JulianKoplin_final_signed_scanpdf.pdf https://hdl.handle.net/10013/epic.aa9c102d-2421-42fd-9890-b251c6777d71 |
| Summary: | The Arctic Ocean is especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Warmer ocean temperatures and reduced sea ice coverage lead to a poleward shift of communities in the Arctic Ocean. This process, termed borealization, is considerably changing Arctic marine food web structure with implications for ecosystems dynamics and functioning. Zooplankton is a good indicator of climate change in the marine environment and helps understand what role aberrations in the water mass circulations could play for ecosystem functioning. To better understand how the communities adapt to the changing environment and what the potential impacts, such as borealization, could mean for the arctic habitats, monitoring the community composition on a regular basis is crucial. Traditional taxonomical analyses are time consuming while the semi-automatic image analysis using ZooScan was developed to reduce time. This study aims to provide further information on the composition of epipelagic zooplankton communities in the Arctic Ocean determined by ZooScan image analysis and to verify whether there is a biogeographical and hydrographical pattern on the shelf and slope of the Barents Sea and in the Nansen Basin. Additionally, this study tried to confirm whether the taxonomy-based optical method ZooScan leads to similar results as dry-weight measured biomass data in term of size distribution and total biomass in different size fractions. The expedition PS 106.2 with the research vessel Polarstern provided an opportunity to sample the epipelagic zooplankton community from the shelf of the Barents Sea into the Nansen Basin proper, crossing a gradient of decreasing influence of Atlantic Water (AW). This study confirmed the hypothesis that there was a biogeographical and more importantly hydrographical pattern of mesozooplankton community structure in the study area of PS106. The basin domain is characterized by two basic water masses. The Atlantic regime (AR) with near-surface Atlantic Water (AW) and the polar regime (PR) with AW at a ... |
|---|