Biogeography and Resilience of Intertidal Southern Ocean Communities

The intertidal zone (seashore) is a critical environment at the interface of marine and terrestrial habitats, where inter-linked environmental and anthropogenic stressors occur.

In polar regions, especially in the Southern Ocean, biological communities living in the intertidal zone remain largely underexplored.

Understanding the diversity and biogeographic relationships existing among intertidal communities would prove central for deciphering their origin and evolution.

It is also crucial to assess their vulnerability to global changes as the Southern Ocean is currently facing fast pace environmental changes.

BioRISC aims to evaluate the biodiversity, biogeography, and resilience of intertidal communities at an unprecedented spatial scale across the Antarctic and the sub-Antarctic.

By using an integrative, community-based approach, the project will address fundamental ecological questions involving the assessment of biogeographic regions, the importance of environmental heterogeneities and the evaluation of community resilience to climate change scenarios.

The work will combine standardized in situ protocol with thorough taxonomic identification, and genetic methods (DNA barcoding and metabarcoding of several genes) to produce an unprecedented dataset for community structure analyses. In addition, BioRISC has a strong conservation component, including the monitoring of non-native species.

The results will fit the needs of nature managers at both the regional (Crozet, Falkland, Kerguelen Islands) and global scales (Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources - CCAMLR).

Altogether, BioRISC will therefore provide a critical assessment of the uniqueness of these communities and test how their composition and distribution are likely to shift in the future based on IPCC-derived scenarios of climate change.