Analysis of Bacterial Communities around the Adventdalen Landfill Site in Svalbard.

Ecosystems are often resilient enough to fully recover following a natural disturbance, or to transform into a new equilibrium favourable to the surrounding flora and fauna. However, at a local level, whether this transformation will be beneficial or not depends strongly on the level of disturbance and the available mechanisms for recovery. The Arctic, however, provides a potentially extreme environment for microbial growth and this is reflected in the microbial biodiversity, the in-situ growth rates, the biogeochemical cycling and its sensitivity to environmental change.

Aerobiology over the Southern Ocean - Implications for bacterial colonization of Antarctica.

Parts of the Antarctic are experiencing dramatic ecosystem change due to rapid and record warming, which may weaken biogeographic boundaries and modify dispersal barriers, increasing the risk of biological invasions. In this study, we collected air samples from 100 locations around the Southern Ocean to analyze bacterial biodiversity in the circumpolar air around the Antarctic continent, as understanding dispersal processes is paramount to assessing the risks of microbiological invasions. We also compared the Southern Ocean air bacterial biodiversity to non-polar ecosystems to identify the potential origin of these Southern Ocean air microorganisms.

Functional Associations and Resilience in Microbial Communities.

Microbial communities have inherently high levels of metabolic flexibility and functional redundancy, yet the structure of microbial communities can change rapidly with environmental perturbation. To understand whether such changes observed at the taxonomic level translate into differences at the functional level, we analyzed the structure of taxonomic and functional gene distribution across Arctic and Antarctic locations. Taxonomic diversity (in terms of alpha diversity and species richness) differed significantly with location.

Climatically sensitive transfer of iron to maritime Antarctic ecosystems by surface runoff.

Iron supplied by glacial weathering results in pronounced hotspots of biological production in an otherwise iron-limited Southern Ocean Ecosystem. However, glacial iron inputs are thought to be dominated by icebergs. Here we show that surface runoff from three island groups of the maritime Antarctic exports more filterable (<0.

A Holarctic Biogeographical Analysis of the Collembola (Arthropoda, Hexapoda) Unravels Recent Post-Glacial Colonization Patterns.

We aimed to describe the main Arctic biogeographical patterns of the Collembola, and analyze historical factors and current climatic regimes determining Arctic collembolan species distribution. Furthermore, we aimed to identify possible dispersal routes, colonization sources and glacial refugia for Arctic collembola. We implemented a Gaussian Mixture Clustering method on species distribution ranges and applied a distance-based parametric bootstrap test on presence-absence collembolan species distribution data.