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Climate change, ecosystem collapse and cascading regime shifts in the Canadian Arctic

By Dr. Warwick F. Vincent (Centre for Northern Studies /Centre d'Etudes Nordiques, Universit茅 Laval)

The Canadian Arctic contains a remarkably diverse variety of aquatic ecosystem types including permafrost thaw lakes, large rivers discharging to the Arctic Ocean, lagoons and other coastal ecosystems, and perennially ice-capped, solar heated lakes. Our analyses of the molecular microbiology of these waters have revealed diverse communities in each of the three domains of microbial life, with implications for biogeography, food web structure and 聽biogeochemical processes including greenhouse gas fluxes. The Arctic is currently warming at twice the global average, and some of these aquatic ecosystems have begun to experience step-like changes in their physical and ecological regimes. Our observations imply that global climate change will be increasingly accompanied by discontinuous shifts in aquatic ecosystem structure and function.

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