Dr Mikołaj Mazurkiewicz1, prof Agata Zaborska1, Dr Joanna Legeżyńska1, prof Ksenia Pazdro1, Dr Anna Pouch1, Prof Jan Pawłowski1, prof Maria Włodarska-Kowalczuk1
1Institute of Oceanology Polish Academy of Sciences, Sopot, Poland
Biography:
Dr Mikolaj Mazurkiewicz is an assistant professor at the Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences. He has a background in the benthic ecology of the Arctic, particularly in the study of soft bottom communities. In recent years, he has been engaged in an effort to integrate traditional morphology-based tools and eDNA metabarcoding in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the factors that influence the diversity of bottom-dwelling assemblages.
Abstract:
Arctic ecosystems are increasingly exposed to dramatic environmental changes and multiple stress factors resulting both from climate warming and from increasing anthropogenic pressure. Coastal systems directly affected by terrestrial inputs are considered to be “melting pots” of environmental stressors, including extreme salinity variations, terrestrial mineral and organic matter supply as well as pollutants loads. In the Arctic, all these stress factors occur at the highest intensity in areas directly influenced by glacial or glacial fluvial discharges. In the presented study we visited nine Arctic estuaries off west Spitsbergen to investigate the response of macrofaunal and metabarcoding-based diversity to gradients of quantity and quality of available food sources (photosynthetic pigments, POC, TON, δ13C, δ15N), organic pollutants (PCBs, PAHs), heavy metals (Cd, Pb, Zn, Cu) and sediment accumulation rate. We investigated composition and diversity through traditional, morphology based methods (for macrofaunal invertebrates) and metabarcoding of sediment eDNA for eukaryotes (using 18S V1V2 marker) and prokaryotes (16S V3V4). We explore the relationships between pollutants and other environmental stressors and diversity indices of eukaryotes and prokaryotes and we aim to identify the key indicator taxa (and/or ‘indicator sequences’) that can be used as biological indicators of disturbance. We propose sediment metabarcoding as a new tool for assessing and monitoring the status of the Arctic ecosystem in the era of increasing anthropogenic pressure and climate change.