Cross-disciplinarity in the advance of Antarctic ecosystem research

GUTT, JULIAN; ISLA, ENRIQUE; BERTLER, NANCY; TWENTY MORE AUTHORS; SCHLOSS, IRENE R.

MARINE GENOMICS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2018

1874-7787

The biodiversity, ecosystem services and climate variability of the Antarctic continent and the Southern Oceanare major components of the whole Earth system. Antarctic ecosystems are driven more strongly by the physicalenvironment than many other marine and terrestrial ecosystems. As a consequence, to understand ecologicalfunctioning, cross-disciplinary studies are especially important in Antarctic research. The conceptual studypresented here is based on a workshop initiated by the Research Programme Antarctic Thresholds ? EcosystemResilience and Adaptation of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, which focussed on challenges inidentifying and applying cross-disciplinary approaches in the Antarctic. Novel ideas and first steps in theirimplementation were clustered into eight themes. These ranged from scale problems, through risk maps, andorganism/ecosystem responses to multiple environmental changes and evolutionary processes. Scaling modelsand data across different spatial and temporal scales were identified as an overarching challenge. Approaches tobridge gaps in Antarctic research programmes included multi-disciplinary monitoring, linking biomolecularfindings and simulated physical environments, as well as integrative ecological modelling. The results of advancedcross-disciplinary approaches can contribute significantly to our knowledge of Antarctic and globalecosystem functioning, the consequences of climate change, and to global assessments that ultimately benefithumankind.