Production and Biomass of Seaweeds in Newly Ice-Free Areas: Implications for Coastal Processes in a Changing Antarctic Environment

QUARTINO, MARÍA LILIANA; SARAVIA, LEONARDO A.; CAMPANA, GABRIELA LAURA; DEREGIBUS, DOLORES; MATULA, CAROLINA VERÓNICA; BORASO, ALICIA L.; MOMO, FERNANDO R.

Antarctic Seaweeds

Springer

Año: 2020; p. 155 - 171

The Antarctic rocky coasts are mainly colonized by extensive seaweedcommunities, which play key roles as food resource, habitat, and refuge for manybenthic and pelagic organisms. Due to climate warming, Antarctic marine ecosystemsare being affected by glacier retreat opening new habitats, e.g., newly ice-freeareas that can be colonized by macroalgae. As a consequence, primary productionand fate of macroalgae are changing in these new polar environments. In these ecosystems,the carbon production, especially from large brown algae, is an importantfood source to the benthic invertebrate communities mainly when other resourcesare scarce. Thus, in new areas colonized by seaweeds, the trophic structure andbiogeochemical fluxes can vary considerably. Moreover, when seaweeds die or areremoved by water movement, ice scouring, or storms, they are detached, fragmented,and degraded, incorporating and releasing particulate and dissolved organicmatter to the coastal food webs, i.e., they support a large fraction of the secondaryproduction of the benthos. The present chapter is a review of the knowledge onseaweed biomass and production in the coastal Antarctic ecosystem opening a discussionon the role of these organisms as main energy sources in, e.g., small fjordsand glacier-influenced sites, impacted by recent climatic change